By itself, this is bad, but they began to believe their superiority was intrinsic to being Intel, AKA hubris. They lost sight of the fact that they were lucky and puffed themselves up as the sole masters of silicon.
I think they started down the wrong path when they turned down Apple's entreaties in the mid 2000s, telling Apple they'd only fab phone chips for them if they used x86. Now I'm not saying they should have been able to recognize what iPhone would become. No one thought Apple would be where they are now, not even Steve Jobs. I remember between the iPhone announcement and its launch it was reported that supposedly Apple's internal projections for the iPhone is that it would reach 1% of the overall mobile market after 2-3 years, which would have meant selling around 10 million phones a year, and people laughed and laughed.
Regardless it was obvious at the time to anyone with a brain that cell phones would get smarter over time (whether it was Apple, Nokia, Microsoft, or Blackberry that got them there) and their computing needs would grow continue to grow as they had already been doing since the late 90s Nokia bricks where running Snake was most demanding task the CPU would be asked to perform.
That hubris you speak of caused Intel to see everything as fitting into an x86 sized box. They feared low end CPUs - because the reason they were in the place they were in 2005 is because their "low end CPUs" ate the RISC market from the bottom up - the RISC vendors couldn't compete against the PC market's economies of scales (and it didn't help that market was split five ways too)
Intel they felt they had to control the low end market, and they would do it by making the market below them x86, hence the development of Atom and all their ridiculous effort trying to get the embedded world to adopt x86. They didn't want to be attacked from below like PCs had attacked RISC, like RISC had attacked Minis, like Minis had attacked mainframes. So that's why you saw Atom, but OEMs buying Atoms were contractually restricted from putting them in a PC - gotta preserve your margins!