True, and not true, all at the same time. The 3700+ would beat a Pentium 4 3.7 in games with a smile, but for video encoding, the P4 3.7 would tear the Athlon 3700+ a new one. It all depends on what you plan to do with it. But if you take an average between those two fields, they would be equal.
Why do they care? They don't, otherwise AMD would have tried increasing clockspeeds a long time ago. Its not about clockspeeds anymore, its about architecture. The same with the Conroe (from Intel), where the 2.6GHz model beats the FX60 from AMD. They basically built a CPU with a more streamlined way of doing things. That beats raw speed anyday!