While the phone doesn't meet it's stated spec, it's still pretty amazing that tech that'd have been top of the line a few years back now costs less than a night out.
Almost none of the phones in that range are truly "no-name" (though beware the fakes) - even Oppo and Jiayu are fairly established brands by now, though obviously nowhere near as well known.
They have some... interesting models like this one, which is far cheaper than $400:
http://www.gizchina.com/2014/06/28/octacore-jiayu-g5s-review...
I have the quadcore (MT6589) version and have gotten quite a few "is that an iPhone running Android?" questions, which somewhat adds to the experience of owning one. It's slightly bigger than an iPhone though.
This because transistor density allows for two things, but Intel is only pushing one of them.
First it allows for more compute power for a certain price.
Second, it allows for a set compute power at a lower price.
The second comes because you can stack more chips on a single wafer, and so get a bigger yield out of each production run.
I suspect Intel avoids that one because it will inevitably lead to a race to the bottom.