Personally I believe that this must be some kind of engineering sample or otherwise.  I refuse to believe that Intel would make so many obviously bad choices that would be picked up by every single reviewer, every gaming site and most technically minded users.

1. 16 PCIe rather than 20 (CPU lanes), unless the PCH makes up for these with additional lanes (which are inferior to direct CPU lanes), this simply makes no sense.  Ideally you want the GPU and at least one NVMe SSD running directly to the CPU, with full x16 and x4 bandwidth.

2. A lower single core speed?  There is no reason for this, in use cases that stress only one core, the other 5 don't matter as to overall power consumption, so staying within the 45w envelope is absolutely possible (as noted by the increase of single core to quad core clocks from 7th to 8th gen desktop CPUs across the board).  It would be a blatantly obvious downgrade, for no real technical reason.  Historically, single core turbos have improved *every* generation since the introduction of the Core i**** series.  I find it very doubtful that Intel has reversed this for no apparent logical reason.  Especially with the introduction of actual competition from AMD.

3.  How can it be the same BGA socket?  The six core requires different power delivery, hence the move from z270 to z370.

4. The most obvious route for Intel, compared to the 7700hq would be +100/200mhz on single core turbo clocks, +100 to dual core clocks, +100/no change mhz to quad core clocks, and -200/300mhz to six core clocks (comparatively from quad core limits).

These are made on the assumption that the 8700hq is a direct replacement for the 7700hq.  If it's some kind of 8720hq, it may not be intended to be, and perhaps the 8700hq is instead a quad core with higher clocks, or is simply skipped this generation. It may be the case that high boost clocks+high core count is simply not possible with 14nm, regardless of how many +++ there are in the current generation.

Again, think about it from an overall perspective, what would Intel look like releasing a comparative downgrade in most use cases from their last gen CPUs, at the same time that Ryzen has been introduced?

The thing is, even if the quad core turbo is equal or better than the 7700hq (wich I doubt) it will be barely used by applications because they are not coded to use only 4 cores out of a 6 core and not put any processing on the remaining threads, so the max turbo 4 core will never be full activated and usable for long periods of time.

As for the naming, I read on another website that it is gonna be called i7 8720HQ instead or 8700HQ, so I guess the names for now are mere speculation? because even on cpu z no naming at all according to cpu Z screen shot I seen on another website.

The clocks are pretty much confirmed tho, in accordance to every other website reports. 3,6ghz 1 core turbo, 2,9ghz 6 core turbo, 2,4ghz base clock. These CPUs have no interest to me. The fact they had to stick to 45w made it impossible to improve the clocks on 6 core, because cpu gets hot. (8 threads on 7700hq vs 12 threads now).

So pretty much a downgrade except multicore works? Unless the 4cores turbo clock beats 7700HQ all core turbo.

Btw, isn't Q stands for quad core? If not, then what HQ stands for then?
It was QM for quadcore mobile, then HQ High perfomance graphic Quadcore

Not too excited about this. So they dropped 200mhz on the max turbo from the 7700hq wich had 3,8ghz single core turbo and a massive 500mhz from the all cores turbo (2,9ghz vs 3,4ghz on the 7700hq). Wich is bad for high refresh gaming (eg: connecting the laptop to external monitor as I usual do at home) and not as good on single threaded applications. Well, it is an upgrade because it has 4 more threads but if someone like me doesn´t use anything that benefits from that, I guess I will wait for price drops on the 7700hq models and I´m good to go.

These Coffee Lake H will be as good as an older 6700hq in most games and worse than the 7700hq. That´s not an upgrade, is like a sidegrade with better performance on specific tasks only.

I will just buy a 7700hq laptop now, thankfully these leaks appeared now when everything is on sale :D