A useful comparison but I feel like the real test is to compare to whatever the new Pixel 4 night mode is going to have. Apple had a year to play catchup with the Pixel 3
To be fair, pixel 3 destroyed iPhone X in night mode when first released (they did a comparison during the keynote, which is very unusual for Google [1]). Everyone said this could not be topped...
11 months later and Pixel 3 is probably not even in top 5.
Long exposure photography has been around for decades. The tricky part isn't even hardware so of course it was going to be equalled and surpassed. The pixel hardware wasn't amazing when it was first released and now it's quite outdated. It's a matter of stitching pictures and blending them seamlessly, google was the first to apply that on phones because they had the edge in software / visual machine learning.
It's technically amazing and very useful but it's not black magic either, apple taking 2 generations of phones to catch up is the most surprising part to be honest.