Perhaps we've just been spoiled with the leaps that AMD has been making recently.
It's probably not a deliberate trade-off, their 10nm process is simply not good enough yet to get high yields when pushing clock speed. Their 14nm process was excellent in this regard, after they optimized it for so long, it is the only main advantage 9th-generation Intel parts still have compared to Ryzen 2. It's not a surprise they have to take a step back in that regard until 10nm improves.
That's not something given. The "more performant under same power envelope" chips in the lineups all have more cache, more vector extensions, smt unlocked, more turboboost, but no actual qualitative improvements.
Some even argued that Ice Lake is less power efficient than latest Skylakes derivatives.
The chip is getting mixed reviews.
personally am more excited about the prospect of less-crippled ultras than a few % bump in single thread performance.
Just before the smartphone revolution happened, Microsoft decided to make a GPU-centric graphics architecture (WDDM, which Wayland) imitates and Intel decided to make an integrated GPU that was just barely adequate to run Windows Vista.
Intel's plan has always been to take as much of the BOM for a PC for themselves, so they hoped to vanquish NVIDIA and ATI and might have even succeeded if it wasn't for cryptocurrency and deep learning.
The trouble is that Intel has been pursuing phoneishness for the last ten years instead of performance, systematically erasing the reasons why you would buy a PC instead of a phone. They've tried to sell phone chips in China where there is no free press and they can keep people from talking about the benchmark results, how slow their phone is, how hot it gets, etc.
Intel's idea has been that gaming is playing Candy Crush and they've let AMD steal their fire by making the CPU/GPU SoC for the XB1 and PS4 -- PC gaming has converged with console gaming in many ways, but the common denominator is that Intel integrated graphics is tolerable for the most casual of casual games, and even the recent performance improvements get you to 2 frames per second in League of Legends as opposed to 1. Intel is entirely AWOL when it comes to GPGPU on their integrated graphics but it just isn't worth the effort with their low performance parts.
Chinese gov blocking specific keywords and network ranges is one thing. Intel censoring reviews is an extraordinary claim... could use some extraordinary evidence.
Maybe this is due to design improvements unrelated to the process node?
I hope AMD starts using more than 1 chiplet for laptops. Until they do an AMD laptop is limited to 4 cores.