You must be ignoring the laptop market, which I would contend is properly part of the mobile arena. Huge gains have been made there. Also, the gains in desktop have been less about absolute performance, but more about decreasing the size and energy consumption of the desktop. What once took massive full towers, can now be placed in micro atx or mini itx form factors. To me, that is a pretty significant change.
I would have to agree. As has been said before (I forgot who said it) Intel's recent strategy has been to focus on energy savings and small IPC increases rather than their former strategy (last decade) of focusing primarily on performance.
My i5-2430M laptop at the beginning got about 3.33 hours of runtime (now I have 85% of the original capacity, but seems like I'm down to like 2.5hrs of runtime). My friend just bought a Yoga 2 Pro with an i7-4510U, performs a bit better (at least in geekbench), yet the TDP is way lower and lasts about twice as long. And that is only a 2 generation difference.
Just from that example, at least in the laptop space there has been fundamental change in product performance.
Bay Trail was obviously a real nice jump above Saltwell and ushered them to a pretty defensible position, but it seems like Intel is content with Airmont not being much of an advance to all of ours dismay (well maybe aside from a few anti-Intel peeps in here). Willow Trail is the next jump, and it better be good because that will be their last shot at the mobile area in terms of high-end. If that fails, Core M will have to come down in price or companies may migrate away.
This may not be really on-topic but this article seems pretty interesting:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/26/apples-focus-in-israel-chip-design/
Maybe Apple will move away from ARM and just start their own in-house IP for logic. Or maybe they're just looking for more designers to tweak ARM's A72 core as far as it can go per release. Either way if it wasn't apparent from before, Apple is serious about logic design.