Well put. People are being their usual teamsport participants on x86 vs ARM. Intel has execution problems in two departments - manufacturing and integration. ISA is not an issue - they can very well solve the integration issues and investing in semiconductor manufacturing is the need of the hour for the US so I can imagine they getting some traction there with enough money and will.
IOW even if Intel switched ISA to ARM it won't magically fix any of the issues. We've had a lot of ARM vendors trying to do what Apple did for too long.