FX!32 was good compared to what was available elsewhere (including for Itanium IIRC). I am not saying it had to compete with fully with x86 on consumer desktops from beginning, but it would have been more stable position, especially with known upcoming work on 64bit-clean NT5.

EV7 I am interested in more details because I want to know if the slippage was part of the original development run, or the post-Itanium one when it was restarted by HP. EV8 was admittedly dead in the water but I would say not so much for technical reasons as much as for direction options available (vs. following the samsung partnership to bring more AlphaPC-like systems)

The motherboard difference was slight between K7 and EV6 parts from my understanding if there was a will to commit to large scale production (arguably EV67 could be probably made into pin-compatible packaging even). But admittedly small part.