AMD is faster...or is it?

Just read an interesting article about someone buying an AMD laptop over Intel laptop because the Salesperson was strongly selling that AMD is more powerful. The person took the laptop home and found the Excel macro she was able to run in couple of minutes on her friend's Intel laptop took much longer. When she took her and her friend's laptop back to the store and demo'ed the macro on both laptops, they were told that "Microsoft Office was optimized for Intel chips to take advantage of the way Intel chips handle floating point logic, and that AMD was faster in processing speed either way. " What does this means in plain English? If your main purpose is to run Microsoft applications, go with the Intel laptop because it gives better performance. Otherwise, it's personal preference with the brand. And you all know which brand I would go for, right? ;)