ATI has been around so long too. I remember having a Mach 32 and Mach 64. Man those were the days. Drivers? What are these drivers you speak of? *boots up DOS*
I could think of worse names than AMD, but I'll miss having the name ATI being mentioned.

Hum.... AMD is pushing hard on this "Fusion" (CPU+GPU) thingy, but I don't know if this will work out as they would. I mean, the integrated stuff appeared on the market so far is just shit from a performance standpoint and Intel's Larrabee is dead in the water for a reason.
So good luck to AMD, competition is always good. I will always prefer Intel+NVIDIA combo anyway for historical reasons and because I can still play my Windows 95 games on it.
And yes, they "research" on the ATI/AMD brand awareness doesn't say the whole story imho. They are killing a part of themselves and they will pay some cost for this mistake.

Throwing away one of the most respected brands in GPU history seems like a bit of a dumb move.

Brilliant. Just brilliant. When you're deciding on a GPU brand, you shouldn't see the name of a brand that has repeatedly humiliated Nvidia in recent years by delivering products that are cheaper, cooler, faster and more future-proofed (DX10.1 and DX11 cards months ahead of Nvidia's offerings); instead you should see the name of a brand that has been repeatedly trounced by what seems like every iteration of the overclocker's dream that is the Core 2 (and now Core i7).

As I heard it, they made the assumption (probably backed up by shiny graphs and figures at board meetings) that the ATI brand fails to stand in the recognition department as opposed to Radeon and Firepro. Because of this, they had to implement a consolidation of the firm and clipping off it's unusable branches. Typical corporate thinking really.

If you look at the new branding in most cases AMD won't even appear just"radeon" as theres no way Intel will let manufacturers put the top set on intel processor machines the bottom set will be the most common at a guess.