I wasn't being super fair nor nice, but I very much felt like I was trying to combat gatekeeping. I was advocating for open & possible, against someone who was trying to shut people down.
Intel has 160 Gbps of throughput available for connectivity. You might be able to physically get data to all the same devices with AMD, but at much reduced bandwidth, and the job wont be as easy. And you won't be able to use thunderbolt peripherals like external GPUs, if those are available.
USB4 definitely does not require PCIe transport. (it does however require DisplayPort.) Once you have usb4 though, yeah, adding PCIe shouldn't be that much more work-you've already done the hard stuff. Which is part of why I've felt so cheated, thinking AMD hasn't done PCIe in their usb4.
Intel has 160 Gbps of throughput available for connectivity. You might be able to physically get data to all the same devices with AMD, but at much reduced bandwidth, and the job wont be as easy. And you won't be able to use thunderbolt peripherals like external GPUs, if those are available.