Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's honestly not clear that the underlying CPU architecture really matters anymore. Smaller customers might care about the technical hassles involved with switching to a new architecture, but smaller customers don't count. The larger customers care much more about per-unit cost savings, and not at all about NRE costs. In any case there isn't a lot of ARM assembly out there these days, and everything else can retarge…
In practice Intel had to develop an ARM emulator for x86 to even stand a chance in the Android market, because so many apps use native ARM code and they have no reason to so much as recompile.
I suppose thy could buy into an exclusive deal with a minority market share platform such as BB10 or WinMo8 instead, because then the installed base wouldn't matter. That would only work if they could:
(a) offer a competitive advantage over ARM.
(b) make it financially appealing to the platform vendor. (c) Pick a platform that has a hope in hell of getting market traction.
Their best bet there would be MS/Nokia, but it would be a case of seeing if tying three sinking ships together works better than two.