The first i7 from apple starts at ~1.6x the price of the ipad pro in the macbook air 2020, yet the results of comparing the a12z with that show that, performance wise, nothing really changes: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2626721?baselin...
I'd suspect the reason is that these benchmarks are long enough, that the Intel CPUs just end up completely throttled down after the first ~30-60s, while the A12Z does not.
Either way, the trade-offs here have multiple axes, and honestly die-size is not something I as a user care about. I care about performance / $ and battery life / $. The A12z seems much better along these two axes than either of the Intel CPUs in the Air 2020.
To find something competitive in terms of performance (but worse battery life) from Intel, one does need to go to the Core i7 1065G7 that you mention, which delivers approximately the same performance as the A12Z: https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/compare/2627162?baselin...
However, the first machine with that CPU is the Macbook Pro 13' 2020, and that starts at ~2x the price of the ipad pro. From looking at the upgrade prices, the cost of that i7 alone might be by itself ~50% of the whole ipad pro cost, or larger.
So while you are right that these two are comparable in terms of raw power, I doubt they are comparable in terms of performance/$ and battery life/$. Without knowing the exact costs of each we can only speculate. If that intel i7 is 2x more expensive than the A12Z, then perf/$ would be half as good, and since raw battery life is worse, the battery life/$ axes would be twice as bad.