I feel like you're either in one of two groups:
1. a PC "nerd" (kind of deragotory) who is obsessed with specs all the way down to things like L2 cache size, etc.
2. somebody who has 0 clue what any computer/laptop specification means whatsoever
Life was so easy in the MHz-wars days.
The bigger number was basically always better, and you could easily tell by how much.
Pentium III had 20% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Northwood; AMD K8 (Athlon 64) had 35% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Prescott.
Same in the RISC vs CISC days: Pentium had 33% higher IPC than the original PowerPC 601. Late generation RISCs like Alpha were a completely different beast again, with the DEC Alpha 21264 (EV6) having 25% higher IPC than Pentium III.
It was never obvious back then, and it was also never obvious since then.
IPC keeps rising among different architectures. A couple years ago Apple overtook Intel, and ARM did as well.
The P4 is what killed the MHz Wars in my memory. It was clear it couldn’t keep clicking up and it’s poor performance relative to existing chips at similar clock speeds (as you noted) meant the game was over.