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Acquiring ARM only for the chance at an end-to-end vertically integrated design seems quite expensive, albeit not beyond the "insanely great" motivations of Mr. Jobs.

Not beyond? I'd take that a step further and say that end-to-end vertically integrated design is very much a Steve Jobs sort of thing to attempt. He has said he thinks of Apple as a software company and, attributing it to Alan Kay, that "People that love software want to build their own hardware." That said, I'm not sure this would require total ownership of ARM -- just sufficiently large stake in it to exert some direction on its future development (sort of like sharing PowerPC with IBM and Motorola).