For me a Intel smartphone would be cool because it would make running your own version of a distribution a little bit easier.
Desktop distribution don't always support ARM yet, and when they do it usually isn't that well tested on the diverse hardware available. Also compiling packages in the native architecture is easier and faster, and having a Core i7 Desktop PC to compile anything for my phone does make that a lot more comfortable.

That said, running desktop software on a smartphone isn't always a good idea. For a proper user experience interactive applications mostly need to be rewritten with a different GUI. Also non-interactive software needs to be optimized for power consumption. That is something that works a bit differently in ARM and atom as far as I know (ARM puts entire parts of the CPU in idle state, Atom only throttles down afaik).

The most interesting aspect is the performance. The atom CPU performs very well in single threaded applications, but the current dual core Cortex A9 chips beat intel when multiple cores can be used or applications that use the GPU or can use a DSP (video decoding).

I know Intel will have multicore Atom on the way and improved GPU, but so does ARM with Cortex A15 and PowerVR series 6.
Let us see what the actual hardware will cost first