- The displays will be drawing a huge majority of the power—diminishing the effect of the processors.
- The batteries have massively different capacities.
The ability to ramp up your speed at the cost of higher power consumption is a feature, not a bug. You finish the workload faster and therefore the total energy consumed will be lower.
It's funny that no serious person from Qualcomm who works on Snapdragon will with straight face support your point of view about the processor comparison. In fact, they would shit their pants looking at A9 in 2017, let alone A11. I know cause I have talked to a couple. :)
As for Qualcomm, they're really not an innovator in the SoC space as they just take whatever ARM gives them and add their modifications. The ARM A75 cores in the new Q1 2018 SoC's will exceed the multicore of the A11 and be about 25% slower in single core I predict.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kpD3XCp49o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G669OgskM0
Let's see how that A11 is on battery efficiency:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbSjUq_kvSM