Being a process node ahead is already "much better", and IS a feat. Where are the process node ahead chips from the competitors?
On top of that, it's Apple's own SoC design, it has its own GPU design and co-processors, tons of work into making speed optimizations all around (from the buses to memory handling), and came with a new OS release, a port to the new architecture, a bridge layer for iOS apps, and a perfectly capable x86 translation layer.
Rosetta2 alone would be difficult to pull all for most of the industry (Microsoft failed at the same, and their ARM laptops are completely subpar to the M1 machines as well in many levels, despite costing the same or more).
>It's not the first PC chip to be an SOC, or to have unified memory, or to have many coprocessors.
Which mainstream PC chip in actual laptops/desktops people use has unified memory and doesn't use sockets/DIMMS?
>It's also been a decade that we know that instruction sets don't matter. All modern PC processors use a different instruction set and translate from x86.
That's a moot point, since they still carry all the x86 baggage in microcode, since tons of bad decisions leading to things like Spectra. ARM doesn't.