Kind respondent,
You say "Nonsense" when you've just said pretty much everything that I said as an argument to my post. Thanks for the corroboration.
The Atom is a catastrophe in the phone and tablet market. Yes, StrongARM might have had a chance, but DEC didn't invent the 6502 and was only a licensee of ARM-- and DEC had other IP that HP bought and Intel shared over another catastrophe chip, the Itanium. There are a closet full of these things. Intel wanted to control all of the elements, just as Apple has, with their supply chain. They said, essentially: go away. And they did it, and like it or not, it worked. It has its problems. Nothing is problem-free.
But in terms of leadership and direction, Otellini has run Intel into a ditch. Software acquisitions have helped a bit, but in terms of silicon leadership, Intel has lost a lot of ground-- despite the missteps of AMD. The ARM licensees have shown great vision and lots of brains. NVidia eats a lot of lunch and for good reason-- they're not stuck in a ditch of their own making.
Integration is a wonderful thing. We're not talking servers that will last ten years. Consumer devices last about three, then they churn. If they're made by HTC, IMHO, they last about two years if you're lucky. I'm not a believer in disposable electronics, rather, Intel's vision of how to make devices can be readily stated as old-school. The day of fat motherboard chipset licenses is freaking over. The half-life of a phone or tablet design is a meager nine months. Intel just isn't ready to live in those cycles. That's why deft manufacturers have designed around them and the supply chains evolved to move around them.
Intel is leaden.