There's parallels there, where at the time Apple was being pinched by infighting within the the PowerPC consortium. Motorola and IBM were squabbling over who would get to do what, and the 604 vs. 603e battle was well under-way.
Apple eventually bailed on the PowerPC and moved to the more industry standard Intel CPU. It wasn't cloning that solved Apple's problems, it was eliminating their PowerPC handicap.
The real obstacle right now is Intel. They're up against the wall on process, they're flailing a little, and the year over year CPU gains are pretty marginal.
Now that AMD is back in the game maybe that'll help clear up this logjam. The alternative is, strangely enough, that Apple steers towards ARM for their laptops where they have more control over their destiny.
Note that Apple's not the only one feeling the crunch here. Every single laptop vendor is stuck using whatever Intel gives them excepting the few that have gone with AMD.