Operations per second is a notoriously useless measure. Which is why we have higher-level benchmarks like GeekBench that are actually incredibly broad in what they test, performing a lot of real-world type activities in a larger macro-benchmark suite.

The Bionic chips aren't cheating to a win. They win GeekBench, and virtually any other cross-platform activity that you can throw at them. As I mentioned in another post, my iPhone 11 absolutely lays waste to my laptop with an i7-7700HQ processor at the JetStream 2 benchmark. Now this is a JavaScript benchmark that runs on completely different software stacks / OS / etc (my i7 running Windows 10, Chrome 80, etc), but it is layers and layers of dependencies on the performance of the platform. And my big beefy i7 is beaten by a tiny little mobile processor. It is quite remarkable.

It's a blazingly fast little processor. We would probably have seen them use them in other hardware sooner if Apple wasn't always suspicious that Intel was sandbagging in some way and was ready to wow the industry.