Intel in particular had a lot to do with it. For all their talk, they really haven't accomplished much with their Atom line: it's got less than half the IPC of their mainstream architecture and has pretty low clock speeds, and it's been embarrassingly slow about moving to new lithography nodes. (The 22nm Atom has reportedly been delayed to 2014, when Intel's mainstream 22nm chips shipped spring 2012.) On the other hand, Intel refuses to make a sufficiently cheap version of their Core lineup, which is why ultrabooks are so much more expensive and yet most components are still pretty low-quality.
intel likes money. if atoms have lower margins than bigger cpus, then intel will try to make people buy bigger cpus. simple.
standing there indeed, with the smoking gun, the iPad.