No that sucks for everyone. It sucks for Intel too, but apples chips are now a proprietary design that apple themselves own, where software has to conform to.

Nothing good comes from one company owning the entire pie. You create conformance with apple's chips you're subjugating software to apples monopaly whims.

Apple is nowhere near 'owning the entire pie'. If anything, by adding the ARM option to the pie it increases the amount of competition. A few years ago (before AMD rebounded with Ryzen) Intel was also a de-facto monopoly, but the only possibility of avoiding them was to settle for significantly less performance. Now we have 3 players in the high-performance desktop market, seems like an improvement to me.

Maybe that will help RISC-V for the same reasons, too!

But can one compare them? Isn’t it true that RISC-V is merely an instruction set, whereas ARM is much, much more than that - it’s a whole universe of high-quality hardware designs sold (licensed) by a private company right now. And if some other company starts selling/licensing similarly high-quality designs that use the RISC-V instructions, why would that be exciting?

I'm not particularly expert on this, but it seems like RISC-V is ramping up pretty quickly. Presumably an advantage to customers would be that they ideally wouldn't have any vendor lock-in (they could easily switch to a different RISC-V vendor, or even start manufacturing RISC-V chips themselves). They could also customize the ISA with extensions if they had an application for that (although it seems quite conceivable that that's a possibility with ARM too in some way; I don't really know).

I realize that just having a lot of RISC-V hardware options available isn't a guarantee that they're particularly good in terms of their price-power consumption-performance tradeoffs, especially in comparison to ARM (the "whole universe of high-quality hardware designs" that you mention). That may well have more of a delay.

The more the merrier!