DEFkon, I disagree. It's a know fact by any engineer (or what should be know IMO) in that field that you cannot build a system (whether it is high-end, hi-performance, low-cost, what ever) without taking into considering thermal management. With bad thermal management it simply will not work. Also, it is possible to do packaging that are thermally advantaged that have good and functional design. Even using fanless technologies, and that with very high-performance hardware.
With all the latest advances in thermal management, there is simply no excuses. Especially knowing how sensitive modern CPU are both sensitive to overheating and prone to overheat due to their nature (high clock speed - microwave band, high voltage/power, very small structures - 0.6 um or smaller these days).