And Nuvia, Qualcomm, Huawei and whoever else decides to get TSMC to make some killer Arm-based SoCs. Seems like the playing field is about to get a lot bigger.

Well it won't be Huawei

Google also makes TPUs, which competes with GPUs and Nvidia, in addition to making ARM SOCs, is one of the key stakeholders behind Power PC now.

No, you cannot buy TPUs. You can only buy their usage hours from GCP.

I wonder whether the Apple silicon will also feel like "buying usage" or if we'll have low-level enough access to feel like we own it.

I don't think having physical possession of the thing is always the best criteria for whether you really own it.

https://cloud.google.com/edge-tpu/ has a "Buy" button that leads to https://coral.ai/products/ . They appear to be available for purchase?

edit: reading more on the edge-tpu page, they definitely appear to be of limited use compared with the ones available to google's hosted plans.

Edge TPU is not TPU in GCP.

And your point is what exactly?