Performance is not just the only goal for Apple having a brilliant in-house SoC design team. It's also a carefully planned out move to retain as much control over their end product. It's amazing how hardware nerds focus so much on benchmarks that they don't get the latter.
But that's true whether or not Apple has the kind of performance advantage that they have. We were discussing whether or not that performance edge is all that meaningful in the smart phone space, where I don't think it matters much (although Commodus does point out some interesting examples of where it could matter in the future), but as I and others have said it could matter more in the tablet or desktop space.