With the 820 Qualcomm was able to make their own custom cores (I think they went with 2 or 4 instead of 8) and generally overcome the 810 trainwreck. Qualcomm's ability to integrate the radio, GPU, DSP, crypto chip and some other things with a custom CPU into a true SOC is really a massive advantage within mobile and I expect them to build on that with more custom designs.

One last note about big.LITTLE. It seems like a panacea - just move all the big jobs to the big processors and the little ones to the little processors, yay! But this is much, much harder in practice. Doing this wrong leads to disastrous UX, screen tears because rendering shifts off of the big cores being one prime example. Process scheduling is already very tough and current schedulers are the result of many years of experimentation and heuristic best practices. Of course Apple controls the whole stack (i.e. they don't need to worry about where Kernel maintainers want to go with the schedulers) and I'm sure they have some amazing engineers working on Darwin so maybe they were able to overcome problems here. If you can schedule correctly it does seem like a big power savings win. But (and I may be behind the times here) that is a big if...