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The microarchitecture matters. Even ARM's out of order reference cores are very slow compared to intel CPUs. Now take an obsolete decade old core at mediocre 1 GHz and you suddenly have something that is cheap but also extremely slow compared to even a raspberry pi 3 which is also slow as hell.

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so something it's very wrong, if a CPU at 20mhz can run softly a GUI at 800x600 and a CPU at 1ghz can't

A 1 ghz CPU absolutely can run a smooth touchscreen GUI, I think what OP meant is that it's not gonna be capable of running a snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy. You can't really afford the overhead that software running on a modern desktop can, so it will require a bit more work.

For reference, the original iPhone CPU was a single ARM11 core clocked at 412 MHz. Obviously it's possible, this Allwinner chip would run circles around that.

> snazzy Electron interface or some other trendy framework that makes everything super easy

Except that Electron is harder to use than pre-.NET Visual Basic, or Delphi, or especially HyperCard. All of the developer convenience of web apps, with all of the great performance of web apps!

I had smooth GUIs made with Visual Basic 3 running on my old 386@40

And my A1200 with a 68020@20 have a pretty smooth GUI

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