Their risk profile is quite different from Transmeta. Transmeta was more of an all or nothing thing. Either they were better at running x86 in which case they easily could capture big segments of the market, or they were not in which case no segment of the market would be interested in them.

The Mill on the other hand can just start with the segment of the market that is the least inconvenienced by having to recompile their code and expand from there. So basically it's easier for the Mill to gain a foothold (build the best cpu for one segment) but harder to climb up from there.