In that sense it was almost irrelevant to the rest of the market what node Intel had achieved, since nobody else had access to it. Similarly, because it was core to their business model, the foundry business itself was not very cost sensitive; as long as the process tech was exclusive and enabled them to make the world's best processors, they could extract princely sums for the final products.
This has fundamentally changed in a way that will not revert. First, we have reached the "end of Moore's Law": process improvements will still continue, but no longer at a pace such that process leadership guarantees performance leadership. Second, without this guarantee of performance leadership, Intel's entire manufacturing operations are having a crisis of purpose. Their manufacturing operations are much less cost-effective than TSMC because that efficiency was never really a major driving force in the past (and to some extent was at odds with the goal of innovation and leadership).
Without the serious prospect of regaining a performance advantage, Intel will probably not be investing the kind of money needed to displace TSMC in process leadership. Instead the focus is going to be on making sure their existing fabs are not stranded assets and figuring out how to effectively compete on price/performance without a persistent process advantage.
