What kind of laptop did you own? If you've got an iPad 3, any Tegra 3 or Exynos 4412 powered Android Tablet known to my knowledge you have in no way the processing power of a 2006 Laptop. To remind you, a reasonable Laptop in 2006 had a Core (2) Duo CPU, discreet graphics aside. I've used such a Laptop until 2011 to work flawlessy with Eclipse, Photoshop and even older versions of Premiere.
Performance-wise the current ARM CPUs still are lagging behind anything the Desktop had roughly ten years ago.
It's only their power consumption that made them interesting for Apple and only that only with the uprising of very power efficient gpus aswell so the iPhone 1 could have that level of responsiveness at basically no cpu power.
And it's not a fault of X86, which is shown by the newest Intel Medfield CPUs which are starting to outperform the ARMs at the same level of power consumption. At these levels of engineering it boils down to physics. ARMs CPUs aren't just more "cleverly" designed, they had a different scope, different instruction sets and therefor different power specifications.
You can only get so much CPU Speed from a CPU at a certain NM scale with a certain intructionset at a certain power level, and if it's arm or x86 doesn't change that.
ARM should start to feel Intel's breath in their neck, since ARM doesn't have nearly the kind of spending power Intel has to strongarm(no pun intended) the technology beyond the reach of ARMs financial possibilities(The NM race is becoming exponentially more expensive with each iteration...).
Motorola has started to build the RazrI which will be very interesting to watch in the market.