Reliable supply is extremely important. It doesn't matter what the brand is if there's no product because without product availability, there is no OEM build.
Of course there is. Customers just have to wait longer. Considering Intel had very unreliable supply for few years because lack of 14nm capacity on low profit chips (including laptop chips), it's very easy to disagree. It just isn't how it feels to be.
I'd also caution what you say about desktop vs. laptop and server buyers because you've grossly over-simplified it. People who BUILD desktops are tech-savvy but not all desktop owners are builders. There's a thriving "brand-in-a-box" desktop market with the most clueless customers around (because non-clueless desktop owners tend to be builders).
As for servers, I don't know where you get your ideas because in the server space, performance-per-watt is KING with the brand being irrelevant. When AMD had their Interlagos and then Magny-Cours Opteron server CPUs, they were being bought as fast as AMD could make them because they had superior performance-per-watt due to their (at the time) massive core counts. The Cray Titan was the most powerful supercomputer in the world for a good while and it used AMD Opteron 6274 (Interlagos) CPUs.
Builders are very small portion of whole market. Since AMD launched Ryzen, AMD has always gone with "desktop first, laptop last" -route. Laptop market is supposed to be big market but still decides to please small group of builders. AMD is not stupid, they know who appreciate them most.
Again, if performance per watt really matters on servers, then who actually bought "rhymes with Hell" Itanium or worst server chip ever, Pentium 4 Prescott? Well, there were some niche market for Itanic but there were no single valid reason to buy Prescott if performance per watt was important. So again, we can conclude that brand >>> power consumption and everything else.
AMD Opteron sold very poorly in fact. Yeah, it had some success but overall AMD was ditched because, again, brand was wrong.
If brand was all that mattered, then Intel would never have been caught red-handed. This all happened because Michael Dell was annoyed that Dell servers were falling behind. Dell was so tied to Intel at the time that while competitors like Cray could afford to use the (then) superior Opteron CPUs, Dell could not. He finally broke with Intel so that Dell servers could also feature Opterons.
If server managers were as clueless as you claim, this would never have happened and they wouldn't be server managers in the first place.
Just look how "much" server market share AMD got when they got better product on 2001-2002 and total domination 2003-2006:
There is only one relatively small spike but nothing major. Also notice that AMD's share didn't drop very much even AMD didn't have anything to offer for many years. Also because that "spike" came on 2006, 3 years after first Opteron launch, there's no way AMD sold server chips as fast they could make them, so even famous "AMD did not have enough capacity" -explanation does not apply here.
One exception from company that already worshipped Intel doesn't change big picture at all as you can see above.
As for craptops, it really depends. I would agree that there are a tonne of clueless noobs that buy craptops. However, there's also people like me. I always have a craptop for mobility purposes. I would never buy a high-end craptop because that's just a waste of money (I buy mainstream craptops that will be viable for the long-term) but I wouldn't want to be without one at all.
I only use craptops for really light tasks and I take such good care of them that my old Acer 5560 (AMD A8-3500M) from 2011 still runs fine. I had a hardware problem and decided to buy a new one just because it had been 9 years but I got it working again. It just needed a power button that was $15 on eBay.
Good for you. But again, problem is that most laptops goes into companies. Few educated buyers hardly change anything when companies buy gazillions of laptops and only use them for few years. And companies for some reason want Intel. Again, we can safely say that laptop perfemance, battery life etc are not important things. Only brand matters. Despite Intel had very heavy and long term issues with reliable supply. That's exactly what I'm saying here: when looking at big picture, brand is everything and everything else is not.
