Hi Serge,
The major and most important element in the interconnect world is the interconnect capabilities to increase applications performance. The ability to offload the CPU, to execute MPI operations in the interconnect hardware, to provide hardware based RDMA and more, basically an offloading architecture, is the critical element in building the most efficient high-performance systems. The reason that Pathscale did not make it with InfiniPath network products, or QLogic with thir TrueScale products is from lack of any offloading capabilities, and their need to use the CPU cycles for anything related to the network. OmniPath is completely the same as TrueScale.
Intel try to move the discussion to number of ports etc. as they don't want users to focus on the most important item of offloading versus non-offloading. Nevertheless, the number of ports you want to have on the switch ASIC is a number that will fit the sweet spot of the technology. The fact that Intel had to find something to "show benefit" and designed a 48 ports ASIC does not mean it is a better device. Intel switch is a higher latency switch versus Mellanox (110ns vs 90ns), it requires you to use special data protection mechanism (LLR) on any port, and any cable distance. Mellanox does not need to use those mechanisms for 2m copper cables and 30m fiber cables (enough for a datacenter design). Moreover, if you saw the Intel switch design (picture on their web site) you can see a very weird front panel - due to signal integrity issues.
The switch ports, for both Mellanox and Intel are consist of 4 lanes - so there is no advantage here for Intel.
As for your second question the answer is no. Intel does not lock their CPUs and I don't think their will ever be. Intel wants to sell CPUs, as this is their primer business. The reason is that they created Omni-Path is to try and have a differentiation versus the other CPU vendors. Omni-Path does not deliver the performance, efficiency as Mellanox InfiniBand, and it is clearly not proven and actually does not yet exist out there. The best option is Intel CPUs and Mellanox interconnect. And Intel knows that too.