I don't understand why the view is "OMG INTEL SUX" rather than "Wow, Apple did a damn fine job" with its CPU?
Intel is a merchant chip vendor that is fundamentally in a different business than what Apple is in. Apple makes a lot of money selling fully functional devices; SoC cost is an important but relatively small part of the bill of materials of an Apple product.
SoC cost is literally everything for Intel; it needs to make sure that the die sizes of its products are cheap enough to produce in order to support many customers offering products at many different price points.
If you see how the die size of Intel dual and quad cores have been steadily shrinking from the 32nm generation its clear that Intel is able to get away with it because AMD has failed miserably. Meanwhile Intel gross margins have been rising all the time and Intel has been more keen on their gross margins than providing more performance/cores for the same price. So I am happy Apple is challenging Intel atleast in the mobile market.
Apple has achieved something truly excellent here with the A9 and the A9X -- these are wonderful chips and are the product of first class engineering and a laser-like focus on a handful of great products. But to criticize Intel because Apple managed to deliver an SoC with competitive single-threaded performance doesn't seem fair to me.
I want Intel to be challenged strongly in all its markets. Right now its all one way traffic for Intel in servers, desktops, notebooks. In the mobile market Intel is not dominant and faces fierce competition from the ARM ecosystem. In fact I am a strong believer that ARM ecosystem will eventually provide good competition to x86 across the computing spectrum from phones/tablets to notebooks/desktops and servers. Apple is proving it can be done and I expect hopefully there are other companies who do it in other segments of the computing industry.