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Yes and no TBH.

Some Juniper gear emulated the IP2 forwarding asics in software, its fairly decent for what it is. All of the packet inspection stuff runs inside of FreeBSD. The new vSRX is all software and uses commodity cpu power for everything.

For raw speed, pfsense does a really good job on the low end of things but doesn't offer a lot of the inspection/IPS features that JunOS has. Arguably few people actually need IPS anyways.

The same goes for a VMX, which arguable is even harder to virtualize (and it is not on par with a real MX series router yet). Mainly because emulating some trio chipset features is at the moment very hard/impossible to do with great performance. (especially the dense queing part)

There’s nothing special with the asics. Juniper makes it’s own Core and Edge routing chips but Arista competes successfully using Broadcom silicon.

There are switches out there by either Juniper or Cisco (can't remember which job I used them at) which actually have ARM CPUs on each switchport for one hardware acceleration feature :)

Which platform? Most of their hardware uses commodity ASIC/npu which really isn't magic, lots of great white label choices around.