Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this really so different from any other mobile derived GPU?
Yes. Apple have their own graphics API. They were able to decide that, say, geometry shaders aren't worth the chip area or engineering effort to support. Other IHVs don't get that choice; for geometry shaders, for instance, they're part of both Vulkan and OpenGLES, there are games and benchmarks that use them, and customers (end-users, gamedevs, review/benchmark sites, SoC vendors) will evaluate GPUs based, in some s…
I don’t think it’s accurate to say Apple “dropped” these features. Tessellation is done with general purpose compute shaders. You can do the same with “geometry shaders” if the need arises as well