IMO Intel has over-engineered Core Ultra. The packaging is very advanced but what if that complexity isn't needed? Never send a bunch of chiplets to do a single die's job.
In the short term, this makes them much less dependent on their first EUV process, since that's now only used for a small chiplet of just the CPU cores, while the rest is on a more affordable and reliable TSMC process. That risk reduction may have been critical to being ready to ship this year.
In the long run, I think they also need this kind of packaging to become affordable enough to use across their consumer lineup, not just for the exotic data center parts. Making a big change like this mobile-first and bringing it to desktop in a subsequent generation worked out alright for them with Ice Lake and their 10nm process, so I'm not surprised to see them do it again.
