Are these the same 3nm as Intel operates with? Or are we seeing nano-meter inflation again, in such a way we did with Gigahertz...?
TSMC call it N3 instead of 3nm for a reason. It's not 3nm.
Of course once they were beyond the clockspeed-above-all Pentium 4, Intel themselves stopped focusing on marketing clockspeeds and things gave way to basically arbitrary naming/numbering schemes. (Or to some extent, core counts.)
When intel was dominant (pre-Anthlon XP and pre-Core era), Clock speed alone could have been used to measure performance. Then, AMD Athlon XP come out with higher IPC than Pentiums, but the customers were used "Higher clock, higher performance" even though Athlon XP was faster at the same clock speed.
So, they've changed model names to indicate performance parity, that was the game intel played. They didn't lie or mislead about clock speeds anywhere.
And of course it's not just Intel marketing this way, everyone does, but their more recent naming change makes it more transparent. Tired of years of saying "welll, TSMC's Xnm (or X number with no units that's sort of implied to be nm) is really equivalent to our X+Ynm," they just go for marketing on parity.
Like I said in the start of my previous post, this isn't actually inflating (or deflating as the case may be) but it's just taking a concept that's widespread among the consumers as a proxy for quality/value and marketing to that idea rather than any actual physical characteristic.