Don't forget the venerable Via, SiS, Chips and Technologies, OPTi, ALi, ULi, etc.

They weren't venerable. They were anything but. They were designed to be a lower BOM on the motherboard and 90% of them were buggy garbage.

Speak for yourself, mate! Many fun times were had with machines built by each. I have particularly fond memories of the SiS 630 / 730, Via's KT133A, and lots of old ALi, OPTi and ULi gear from the 286, 386, and 486 era.

Yes, yes indeed. The nVidia nForce chipset (for AMD) was such a leap ahead because it was fast, flexible and reliable.

For Intel, you just picked an Intel chipset and that was that.