[foobiekr]

None of that stuff matters in reality.

You should think about ISA implementations as verification problems instead of problems in building a silicon implementation of the ISA. From that perspective it should be obvious that intel has the best, richest, deepest verification set that exists in the CPU space and since it is tied to x86, that is an advantage for the two x86 vendors. Verification is incredibly hard for complex CPUs and building up verification is time intensive. This is part of the reason that the brainiac end of the design spectrum has pretty much become just x86 and POWER which has nearly the same history.