The Hype of SoC's

The soc thing is nothing new. People have been using processors (power pc, arms, x86 etc) alongside fpgas since the start of fpgas. Xilinx have had hard core cpus in their fpgas for at least 10 years (power pc, now arm), so altera are only now just catching up with Xilinx (10 year lag). Altera have really missed the boat on this, and the fact they farm Linux support off to rocketboards is quite telling (ie. Altera don't care much about the soc market).