It’s not that Apple invented chips that are remarkably faster than Intel’s or NVIDIA’s, it’s that Apple invented an integrated experience on this new architecture with split performance & efficiency cores and did so while maintaining backwards compatibility with macOS x86 apps in a way that’s indistinguishable from M1-native apps. (So they kept the “baggage” as it were, and it still performs fine.)
I expect Microsoft’s Surface line will catch up eventually, but the disconnect between Qualcomm/Intel as chip makers and Microsoft as OS vendor will slow down the transition for a good 4-6 years easy, and we’re 2 years into this transition to ultra-energy efficient architectures with less thermal throttling. (Full disclosure, I’ve a few Apple shares.)
You won’t match its power/performance by doing one thing and suddenly making it there. Intel’s process is quite close to TSMC’s already.
A lot of M1's advantage is in terms of density. That's why they were theoretically able to make such an absolutely enormous processor and keep it cool.
Making that theory work in practice came from decades of low power semi experience. They're extremely good chip designers.
AMD and Intel are on similar nodes at the moment, but Apple has a very notable advantage. It's not "secret sauce" so much as paying many billions for exclusive access.
This is the biggest part of the 'sauce' but having E-cores and extremely close memory (faster memory access - less time the cores need to wait for data - less time spent doing nothing and burning watts) surely helps.