Three things that have always been in Intel's favor have been their truly massive and always cutting edge fab capability (which no other cpu manufacturer has been able to even come close to), their extremely well-funded R&D teams, and their industry relationships (largely due to those other two factors).

Intel is able to field several different processor lines and architectures simultaneously, and also develop multiple new architectures at the same time. That's not something that most other companies can do. They've also been reasonably good at recovering from mistakes quickly (something that Microsoft has also been fairly good at).

That said, it'll be interesting to see how things pan out with the changes to the computing landscape that are in the works now.