I don't want QC to fail but the hype was just too much and they were stupid enough to ignore the advice of experienced OEMs and went with their higher cost boards, adding to the platform costs.
This is probably true, i.e., they could have avoided the (allegedly) mess. But this is very insensible of how the Intel business works.
Intel has a borderline abusive way of doing business. They use their well-established influence to essentially control, or at the very least highly manipulate, all the parts of this ecosystem (OEMs, sales channels, software developers). The price of their parts is not only high, but they had for many years purposefully pushed it to the limits to force OEMs to cut elsewhere (GPUs, for example. NVIDIA knows this very well) only to "rebate" afterward.
This is one of the factors AMD has never been big in terms of design wins, presence in big retailers, or presence on media/reviewers outside of the tech niche.
The sensible thing for them would be to scratch their lofty ambitions and achieve mass market penetration through reasonable and lower prices than the competition. Otherwise it's going to be the chicken and egg problem for native WoA application/games developers (why should they expend extra effort for low sales volume?).
If the leaks are real, their price is already considerably lower.
They are purposefully going for the premium tier. For the aforementioned reason, it is unlikely they are going to be massive in volume, so a budget part would only give them some limited brand awareness. If the smartphone business is any indication, they are better (for Qualcomm's scale) targeting high margin, low volume of the premium tier than battling for every last penny on the entry-level market. There, the mid-high tier is basically disappearing, pushing margins even down.
If emulation gets good enough, they will probably rely on it and call it a day.
I only hope their new parts reach out to close the gap with Apple. Even M1 is very good with Rosetta 2.