I'm aware benchmarks don't tell the whole story, but Geekbench shows the iPhone 13 Pro[0] significantly outperforming the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra[1] - about 60% faster multicore (presumably thermally limited?) and ~80% faster singlecore.
[0]: https://browser.geekbench.com/ios_devices/iphone-13-pro [1]: https://browser.geekbench.com/android_devices/samsung-sm-s90...
The "coupled with" was important. They hit a spot on the performance/responsiveness/power-use graph that others don't, and a lot of that's due to software, not just hardware. It's easy to get incredible battery life if you accept poor performance, or to have great performance by sacrificing battery life, but Apple does the extra work to achieve both. Kinda like how BeOS used to feel way smoother than Windows or (GUI) Linux even when running on far worse hardware.
Likewise in the desktop world, the single core performance of the M1 is on par with top of the line chips, and M2 will be the same, and intel and amd work fine on linux.
Apples decision to keep a locked box has nothing to do with performance, solely to do with keeping people in the ecosystem for revenue.