That is exactly the reason why I won't chime into the blind praise of Intel ethernet cards over Realtek. I've first experienced this issue in 2007 (EDIT: no, that must have been 2-3+ years earlier already, with a e1000 addon PCi card) with e1000 and PCI cards, but also much newer e1000e PCIe aren't immune to this issue either - and when it happens, it causes real data corruption and data loss (e.g. on servers). Given that Intel is writing the e1000/ e1000e drivers themselves, they don't get to blame inadequate linux drivers either - and I've never seen issues like those with Realtek network cards...
Over the years I've fixed this issues differently, either by adding r8168 cards or patching the on-card eeprom of the intel card to disable features permanently (powersaving), but this doesn't instill much confidence in the hardware.
Yes, Intel might do a little more offloading than Realtek, but this isn't really a problem with 1 GBit/s cards on x86_64 - and the r8169 module isn't that bad to begin with.