Intel isn't "Papa's Fabless Semi Company", and they've got better things to be doing with their expensive fabs than running chips through them to sit on shelves for the rest of time, hoping that someone comes along and buys them. I completely understand why Intel's not interested in wasting a ton of money doing a big production run of these chips, and then having to worry about things like the product's lifecycle without a large enough financial incentive to back it.

That isn't to say "they won't sell their solder on chips to distributors," because they absolutely do: Go to Mouser, select Intel, and look - Quarks and Atoms galore, even high end networking chips, all available for purchase.

One of the sad things I've learned first hand about the tech business is that even profitable small products are just not interesting to billion dollar companies. You need large enough revenues to make a splash as well, and these tiny MCUs selling at quantities of 10K here or 20K there just isn't enough to make Intel want to work for it.

Furthermore, if Intel wants to compete with these SoC vendors, they need to start acting like them - the Curie being a good example of that. They built a custom chip to do what their customers asked of them, and now they're selling it directly to those customers. Everything they're doing is fitting the strategy they've laid out.