This was the whole marketing push behind projects like Intel Centrino - to drive even lower system power consumption by mandating certain combinations of certain parts that worked well together. Which continued with things like Intel Atheno & Evo.
Nothing Apple did with the M1 changed the game. It's the same game, it's the same race it's always been, they just are now in the lead of that race with their car. Which is impressive in its own right, but definitely not "revolutionary"
> Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
This goes the other way around. To improve efficiency you reduce the clock cycles and increase IPC instead. That was the M1's advancement over the status quo, a significant increase in IPC. Clock speeds didn't change - in fact, it regressed by a tremendous amount. This regression in clock speed is how the M1 consumes so little power by comparison.
I think that other manufacturers will look into their energy usage as well. That's quite revolutionary, because it seems to me that it has shown a proof of concept for which there's a lot of room to grow in. Less energy means less heat, less heat means you can crank up clock cycles.
My thinking is simplistic but I think someone with more understanding of it will tend to agree with my high level view and tell you exactly why this is revolutionary.
Note: I'm not giving Apple full credit here, I'm giving it half credit. The other half goes to the invention of ARM and RISC micro-architecture in general.