Apple is absolutely leading on this front, starting in the phone space. That being said, I don't think their lead over other distributors is especially large. Apple has taken ARM seriously, and built performance chips in their mobile devices that if not for thermal constraints would handily compete with x86 systems. That being said, the same is true of a Snapdragon. Apple ARM, and certainly M1, is better than the competition, but that's because no one else has looked for performance from ARM. The chip designers haven't really been pushed yet. Now that M1 has demonstrated what can happen when the technology is freed from the phone, we'll see people catch up.
I believe Apple has significant advantage to design CPU cores compared to Qualcomm. They acqhired PA Semi team and has been designing great performance cores continuously compared to ARM Cortex (Especially for Single threaded). Qualcomm no longer develop own CPU core since ARMv8 transition.
