I'm not particularly worried that Intel is directing their research away from virtual worlds. They want to sell more processors, and more powerful processors. Right now, virtual worlds -- especially 3D virtual reality -- offers the biggest promise of computing applications that require a lot of processing. Otherwise, people will never buy new computers, except if the old ones break. :-)
But they might be focusing on supporting more platforms, so they're not putting on their money on just one horse in the race.