During an Intel investor meeting Tuesday, the company's head of marketing said netbooks cost some retailers dearly last summer, as they experienced huge return rates due to misinformative marketing on their part.

"In the first period--June, July, August of last year, there were some in the retail channels that were shipping (netbooks) as notebooks," said Sean Maloney. "They were running ads that had a continuum of notebooks and had this Netbooky thing in there, it was called a notebook. They had very high return rates and a couple of these guys had return rates in the 30 percent range, which is a disaster."

So, basically, they were to blame, not Intel. Maloney claims Intel later approached the retail chains and advised them to market netbooks differently, clearly state up front what they can and can't do, and this seems to have remedied the problem.

More here.