Itanium represents a classic case of jumping architectures and committing too soon. Any mature system represents not just the sum of a huge amount of design work but also an untold number of hours (years really) of beta testing, bug fixing, and iterative refinement. A new system may be built on a better foundation but more often than not in its immature state it will still have shortcomings until it's been through a long period of "burn-in" and bug fixing.