If you look at the historical benchmarks of the non-apple ARM chips, though they're clearly behind apple, they have largely kept pace. Huawei was perhaps even closing the gap before the trade war knocked them out of contention.
I don't think apple was really all that special in this regard. They were ahead of the curve, which is impressive, but the market was created by arm, not just apple. I doubt we'd be seeing this kind of resurgence had others - especially google - not also jumped on the ARM bandwagon. A rising tide lifts all boats; both android and ios likely benefited from each others shared usage of arm because it helped the whole ecosystem.
For some sense of scale: qualcomm's latest chip just released some benchmark numbers, and while they're not all that impressive (https://www.anandtech.com/show/16325/qualcomm-discloses-snap...) it's still good to put "not that impressive" in perspective: they're comparable to i7-6700k in single-threaded workloads, and to an i7-4770k in multi-threaded workloads. The oldest iPhone that runs the same geekbench version I can find is the iPhone 5s, which is a little more than 4x slower in the single-threaded benchmark, and 8x in the multi-threaded. Yet that chip was no slouch!
Obviously, apple's impressive pole position completely hogs the spotlight, but it's worth remembering that the competition isn't actually all that bad. That level of performance would make for an extremely fast chromebook - were it not for the fact that most are cheap cheap cheap and will never use a high-end chip.
Development across the board has been so fast, that if you remember slow ARM chromebooks, I think you attribute that slowness to 2 things other than apple vs everybody else: firstly, they were built to a bargin-basement price, and thus you weren't getting anything near this performance not because it wasn't apple, but simply because they didn't use the right chips in the first place, and secondly, it's been a while, and when things improve that quickly, then a slightly outdated model can easily appear terrible without that being a condemnation of the whole approach.