[ianai]

On another side - has the software side done much to incentivize Intel to innovate over the interim? i.e. Windows has accrued a lot of cruft. It feels pretty outdated at times. It feels almost unprofessional at times coming from a unix-like OS user space and has since the 90s. But then unix-like OSes have been a thing this whole time.

Yeah, I think Intel is our latest, greatest example of the follies of not regulating markets properly. Properly regulated, Intel would have been smacked around or incentivized against dominating the chip market 'back when'. Given the factors required, this may have had to require state-led/funded chip research and fab production. i.e. Effectively making a government do what TSMC did years ago - and privatize the actual results of the efforts at key points/areas. Just enough public investment to push the market toward efficiency then back out. Proper regulation would have kept pressures in place to keep key technologies and manufacturing processes/abilities from entirely leaving the local market, too.