Unsurprising. I don't think the details of TSX have been revealed, but the implementation potentially has complex interactions with the cache subsystem: http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-tm.
Given that TSX is one of the features that distinguishes some of the more expensive Haswell SKU's, is Intel going to issue a refund for affected customers?
I've been tempted recently by the Devil's Canyon repackaging of Haswell that for the first time has some of the workstation/server features (VT-d, TSX, but no ECC) enabled on an overclockable model. Losing TSX definitely cuts down on that temptation a bit, but they've still got the combination of full virtualization capabilities and much higher single-threaded performance than anything else out there.
Four cores is really not that attractive... also a lack of ECC with the amount of ram systems have today is starting to seem irresponsible. The probability of getting bitflips is macroscopic.
I understand that the 4790K isn't really a tradional workstation chip, but it's definitely the right thing for my workload which involves a simulation that's only partially multithreaded and would benefit a lot more from higher single-core speed than it would benefit from more than 4 cores. And ECC would be nice, but in my opinion isn't a hard requirement yet for all workstation usage the way it is for servers; I can certainly get by without it, since the base failure rate of the software I'm using is much larger than that caused by hardware memory corruption.
Given that TSX is one of the features that distinguishes some of the more expensive Haswell SKU's, is Intel going to issue a refund for affected customers?