I think you look at it the other way round -- it is not so much Intel who wanted to win customers over compatibility, but rather the customers who had to port their software, and suddenly saw a possibility to not do that.

It took a while to Intel to accept that the mobile-app providers won't invest the same effort in porting their apps from ARM to x86 given the market penetration, but I don't believe it was a suprising outcome to them.