[dfox]

Another thing is that at the time only other ISA designer that really cared about this market was Hitachi with it's SuperH (and then founded Renesas with the sole intent of becoming meaningful ARM competitor, which obviously didn't happen).

You could get usable low power microcontrollers and almost-SoCs with ARM cores in late 90's. While there were SoCs with other 32b RISC cores they typically were intended for mains powered high performance applications ranging from DVD players to network equipment. See how large part of Freescale's PowerPC SoC lineup are without much exaggerattion "Cisco 2500 on a chip" (obviosly with ppc core instead of m68k and with wonderfully complex DMA-engine/protocol decoder/whatever-thing)