definitely not, no. in certain fields Intel does kill AMD - pretty much the high end desktop market. nothing touches 2600K and very little touches the 2500K. likewise however, AMD's generally better for heavy duty servers (which nobody here uses anyway so it's a moot point) and kills Intel at the low end as well as dominating the middle. another field is laptops - AMD is king thanks to their APUs. they're just ridiculously better for price-performance to the point where it ain't even funny. AMD is 2 gens behind Intel on the high end desktops, Intel's 2 gens behind on laptop gaming with their month old tech. the solution of "well get a good dedicated card!" is one that applies in both areas... and a field where AMD goes "good idea, let me crossfire that to a high level desktop performance."
i mean the i5-2500K isn't really a mid-range processor, it's ridiculously good and almost as good as an i7 for 90% of things, making it a fantastic price-performance player that, if you're with a nearby Microcenter, becomes a very, very real player, if it's still at that price (haven't seen the new ad). if you aren't however, or if it's back to its usual $200-230~ level? then... AMD only really has the high end FX line up there, and it doesn't fare too badly against the i5 and beats it in some tests (mainly encryption and conversions where it beasts everyone). still, FX line just ain't worth it, and the Phenom IIs are just pound for pound the best guys at their price range - they're really just competing with i3s. and while i3s aren't bad, they don't match up. the Phenom II X4s are just dirt cheap - when you can get the chip AND the motherboard for a good 70-80% of the performance of what you'd get in the 2500K, you've got easily the best deal. and of course the vid card's gonna be the main player here, but Intel has nothing to SLI there so it doesn't work out as well.
for a $1000 budget, sure an i5 is the one to IMMEDIATELY look at, especially if it's $170 and can get a very future proof motherboard at a solid discount. however if you're okay with cutting your budget by half for 70% of the same performance, then you're still not gonna have a problem. and if you don't want to cut THAT much there are other options too - trim down $1000 to $700 and lose some 15%. that's mostly the field AMD exists for, and it's hardly being cheap at it because the CPU can be upgraded without too much hassle. what's important is having a motherboard that allows a lot of future usage, a power supply that's reliable and will last, and a case that lets you play. the rest, CPU included, are all tweakable parts and losing a bit of performance at a lot of saving is perfectly reasonable.
and being confident in maxing everything for 5 years is a terrible idea. optimization will continue to improve and it'll look good, sure, but max in 5 years can (and frankly, likely will easily exceed this) literally be a machine 4x stronger than whatever's out there today. we're right on the corner of major breakthroughs again and there's gonna be plenty of R&D going into PCs.
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The King Wang.
Listen up Urinal Cake. I already have something that tells me if I'm too drunk when I pee on it: My friends. - Colbert.