The trick is get a system standard in place, that has the tendency to commoditize the chips and Intel was in a position to control the value chain (price of the CPU is still a disproportinate cost of the overall system). So someone has to create the standard on faith that the increased volume will make up for the price pressure that comes with commoditization.

Now ARM could come up with a spec for the 'ARM System Standard' and license/certify that. That has some possibility if someone like Google made sure that the Android kernel always ran on the 'reference design' standard. But that level of strategic thinking has been very hard to co-ordinate to date.