>As an example of this I do wonder if the PC industry realises the bind they’re now in with the Apple and the M1.
Apple has had their own chips before and the PC industry is fine. These sort of things are always cyclical. It's easier for Apple to do the M1 when it's a shiny new thing than keep innovating for a decade. Eventually someone will come up with some innovation they can't match and it will swing back towards integrating commodity parts.
All you have to do is look at the success of the A-series chips for the iPhone/iPad and how they've progressed over the past 10 years. While year-over-year they don't necessarily add something big and shiny (a bump in specs, occasional co-processor), if you compare an A14 to an A9 from 5 years ago the differences are huge.
It doesn't take a "shiny new thing" every year to keep the M series chips looking better than Intel. Perhaps you're right and in another 10-15 years it'll come back to commodity parts, but it would take something Very Shiny to push that at this point. And afaict Intel is in no position to deliver anything shiny enough to do that.
Apple has had their own chips before and the PC industry is fine. These sort of things are always cyclical. It's easier for Apple to do the M1 when it's a shiny new thing than keep innovating for a decade. Eventually someone will come up with some innovation they can't match and it will swing back towards integrating commodity parts.