Intel's competitive strategy has, historically, always been to retain such an overwhelming technical advantage in terms of transistor count that the other thing

Intel's competitive strategy has, historically, always been to retain such an overwhelming technical advantage in terms of transistor count that the other things didn't matter--they could make a huge profit while still providing better value than the competition. The only time that didn't work until now was when they tried to completely switch architectures (with Itanium) and they were able to quickly recover their advantage by returning to an x86-based architecture. Now, of course, this strategy has finally failed them, and all sorts of people are accusing them of having been complacent due to the lack of competition, but really I don't think they were doing anything differently from before (at least with regards to what you're talking about).