Given Intel's history, it would be much more surprising if Intel wasn't lying or being misleading for once

To be fair, AMD played these games too when it was hopelessly behind in architecture and design (cherry picking benchmarks, comparing to lower powered CPUs, etc). Always wait for independent reviews.

How big is this high-end processor market for these companies that there's so much focus on it? Or is it more of like a battle "Who can make the bestest processor?"

Seriously the best is a low TDP ultralight processor that can crush 99% of usecases. Which seemed like AMD did well this past gen.

I think to a large extent the last decade or two of Intel's product strategy has been to build a design, and then arbitrarily segment the market. So you end up with different clock speeds, different core counts, enabled hyper threading, a few features, cache size, PCI-E lanes, and TDP, and things like ECC support.

But fundamentally, you just have 1 design with stuff removed from it, disabled or slowed down through some fuses or some firmware. So it makes sense, if you want to know which is the best CPU just look at the top of the line. Look at the one that is the fastest, because that's fundamentally representative of how good that entire line of chips can be. So it's a good comparison.

Once you've got that information, you can then compare how AMD and Intel structures their pricing. But if Intel are leading on pure top end performance it puts them in the driving seat when it comes to setting prices, because generally Intel and AMD target roughly the same features for the same price point.

I think it's mostly about PR. End consumers will care only about Intel = good, AMD = bad (or the other way around). It helps selling laptops with Intel inside sticker.

Well actual numbers will be released tomorrow when embargo ends.