Back then, "faster" really meant faster. These days, there's far less of a gap between processor generations for a consumer use-case. Running Firefox on Windows 10 to check Gmail and Facebook and occasional Word usage probably wouldn't feel much slower if you're on an Apple A10 processor vs a Skylake core i5. We long ago reached the point where an iPad processor was fast enough for consumer usage, and I knew plenty of college students who were happy with their Surface (non-pro, ARM-based).
For you and I, we want the fastest machines possible, and right now it's x86. For everyone else, I doubt they've even given it a thought, and I don't think they'd notice.
