I don't agree. A 256 bit profile of the new AVX stuff gives you lots of goodies over AVX2, including mask predication, the fancy ternary op, and so on.
Additionally, because it consumes half as many register bits as the 512 bit profile, it could be a lot more economical (and power efficient) to implement on cores that are not the high end server parts. Keep in mind ARM (even the top of their line) is still stuck on 128.
So I think the case for this is a good one.