No, it's true. What Apple does is partially pay more square mm of silicon for the same performance to reduce power, and partially things like restrict the use of small page sizes to allow VIPT L1 cache. And partially the ARMv8 64 bit architecture is a ground up redesign intended to used in modern high end architectures, though that's a smaller factor I think.
If you're only needing that compute power in burst mode, it's fine - and a laptop/PC with actual fans and heat sinks can push quite a lot more out of the same chipset.