Yes, but usually they run on very old kernels, with many of the drivers patched out of tree instead of being upstreamed. Because of that many system components(firmware, bootloader, etc) are either old, unmaintained, buggy, or affected by lots of CVEs.
This new SOC, has Qualcomm's commitment to be using the latest kernel - 6.9 and to have better support. We'll see what this means for the future, but it looks better already.
Yeah, you are right. Android is a variant of Linux.
Just like MacOS and iPadOS, both run Darwin kernel, but they are very different. Even though iPads have very capable hardware, there are a lot you cannot do on iPadOS.
The same applies to Linux. People want a real desktop operating system.
Unfortunately, when people call their os Linux, they typically are referring to its kernel. I wish there was a better term to distinguish Linux distros from the kernel.
This new SOC, has Qualcomm's commitment to be using the latest kernel - 6.9 and to have better support. We'll see what this means for the future, but it looks better already.