EDIT: Remember, the previous generation had two A9 cores, and this one has four A9 cores. My vague impression is that the A9s in Tegra 2 really are more power efficient than the A8s in the original Tegra, but we won't see a transition like that in this generation.
But yes, I agree it would've been nice if they could've moved to 28 nm now, too. But I think Qualcomm will really remain behind performance in the next few years. Their custom Scorpion cores are weaker than Cortex A9 now, and I assume Krait will also be weaker than Cortex A15 which Nvidia, Apple and others will use. It's probably the reason why they could go to 28nm so fast, too.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4243/dual-core-snapdragon-gpu-...
Yes that's a higher clock speed then the competition but they've also announced higher clock speeds for their quad cores next year.
Moore's law has nothing to do with speed, only transistor count in the same space. While the speed increases are impressive, they're still picking off the low hanging fruit, as people haven't fully figured out how to optimize for the space yet. Kal-El will reportedly be using 40nm transistors, compared to the 22nm process Intel is able to do.
Which means there's more room for the amazing in the arena. :)
Intel's advantage is only of about 1 processing node generation, but that's not even for Atom right now. It's only for their highest end chips. Current Atom is at 45 nm, and it will move to 32nm next year, when ARM chips will be at 28nm. But this doesn't even matter anyway. Even if Intel was 2 processing nodes ahead, ARM would still be more efficient.
Even though the whole dev chain is slightly more flexible to an ISA change, Intel will still be slighty x86ed out of the market only they will be on the other side of the fence this time.
Intel won't run on the phones, but they might, if they play their cards right run on tablets and netbooks.
It really does suck to be the 900 Lb gorilla.
ARM chips are only (notably) more efficient when they slower. If you compare like vs like it's not as simple. Eg, 2 GHz ARM A9's are roughly more as powerful as a 1.8 GHz Atom, and have similar power budgets (leaving aside Intel's pathetic chipset & graphics support for now)
I wonder if they would use Android or MeeGo...
Obviously, the biggest factor for Meego's success is if it can get any real attention from the media and consumers.
Even so, they manage to improve the performance about 2.5x every 12 months, and about 4x every 18 months. That's twice as fast as Moore's Law for x86 chips. That's why the ARM chips keep impressing every year on how fast they progress.