Actually, Intel
is marketing the G945, as it was the only available platform for the Atom for quite some time.
If they'd built the platform on the X3100 then the video performance would probably be better.
The GMA 950 has no hardware vertex shaders (tile-based rendering, und so weiter), but has slow but functional pixel shaders. The driver reports shader 2.0 compatibility, at least on my server, which admittedly runs old drivers, but anyway.
At the time of its' release, the GMA 950 had quite impressive performance for an integrated chip (look at my post history for my first impressions of it), and while it required a fast CPU, it was actually able to play most games, albeit on "low" settings.
The Atom CPU sacrificed performance for battery life, thus the 950, which by the time of the Atom's release was getting old, was crippled even further.
Regardless, the 950 has a low power usage, which justified its' use in the Atom platform. I just don't see why Intel hasn't tried to at least use the X3100 or the 4500 and developed a new platform. As I stated earlier, I am convinced that it is the lack of recent development is a main reason for the stagnation of the netbook market.
On a side note, Intel is working quite hard on improving the performance of their 3D-chips, and since they integrated the GPU's into the CPUs, they are actually beating low-end video cards like the nVidia 8400. With the rate they are improving the GPU performance, I wouldn't be surprised if Intel catches up sometime during the next five years. Considering that MS is trying to create a DirectX computing platform, it's not unthinkable.