Peeve: why "i386"?

[Rahul Siddharthan]

Paul Robinson wrote:
> The MD of a local company is not likely to want to 
> know how to re-build his kernel,

Typical stupid red-herring answer one gets.  I already said more than
once that I'm referring to things like release notes and press
information.

FreeBSD:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/announce.html
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE supports the i386 and alpha architectures...
Distributions for the i386 are available now.  [no mention whatever of
better-than-i386 processors]

Debian (to take a random example):
http://www.debian.org/ports/
Intel x86 / IA-32 (``i386'')...
Linux was originally developed for the Intel 386 processors, hence the
short name. Debian supports all IA-32 processors, made by Intel, AMD,
Cyrix and other manufacturers. 

Now, which sounds better and more meaningful?  And what exactly is the
harm with going the Debian way in this respect?

R