You know, a 1GHz x86 core is far more powerful than a 1GHz ARM core.
These devices come nowhere close to competing with traditional computers. Not yet...
These devices come nowhere close to competing with traditional computers. Not yet...
I posit that phones outperform laptops for a lot of people (possibly because upgrading your phone is more widely encouraged).
For historical perspective, Core 2 Duos are from 2006/7. And T7200 is a laptop version, slower than desktop equivalents of the same era.
Desktop CPUs are still much, much faster than phone CPUs. Here's a table with lots of numbers:
http://www.computingcompendium.com/p/arm-vs-intel-benchmarks...
The iPhone 5s, with the "desktop class" A7 chip, has about 15% of the computing power of an i7 4770k, by this benchmark.
Personally, I don't use mobile devices - neither phones nor laptops - for compute-heavy operations. Everything from compilation to video transcoding takes way longer than on a decent desktop. Phones are not close to threatening that yet, not by a long shot.
Trivial work, like text editing, light photo manipulation, sure. Anything that could be done on a PC 15 years ago, sure. But they're nowhere near one another.
In the case of a quad cortex A7, like the one in the Moto G, or the MediaTek MT6589 in the bench comparison, we see that the performances are too bad to replace a laptop. With a score of 1258 it is comparable of the best good old netbooks with Intel Atom.
One option is to run compute-heavy stuff on a networked server, which you SSH into from a lightweight phone/tablet/Chromebook. I can definitely see myself working like that, if I could get a phone or tablet with a docking station.