Nobody was waiting for Intel to get into the cellphone market. The TDP of Intel chips just never made sense, and it was clear that this was because they just didn't institutionally care about that market segment in a real way.

Maybe pundits were waiting, but nobody serious.

Edit: and all these ARM desktop rumors are just that, rumors. They have the ability to ship a competive low to mid end laptop on their own arm chips today, and aren't. Their wide OoO designs would run beautifully in a formfactor that isn't thermally throttled so much. IMO they don't want to switch ISAs and are waiting out the x86_64 patents.