I would love to forget Nuvia, but everyone keeps bringing them up!
As for your theory re: X1, it’s easy to say on paper, but until I see silicon that proves the point I don’t give it much weight. It’s easy to produce paper designs, and hard to produce working silicon. Apple has, every year for the last decade, averaged more than 20% improvement, year after year. Nobody else has done that. And they do that by producing a physical design that is 20% better than qualcomm (really the only current design team that does physical design about as well as apple is AMD). M1 can handle a tremendous number of in-flight instructions, and issue a lot at once, indicating their micro architecture is also either very good, or is precisely tuned to MacOS.
Qualcomm uses an ASIC design methodology. They just cannot compete with Apple’s hand-crafted layouts. And if what Nuvia brings to Qualcomm is “we should use the AMD/Apple-style design methodology” then it will be a few years before you see any benefit from that, because, as the guy who was in charge of creating AMD’s methodology, I can tell you it is going to take a dedicated team a year to get it in shape to use.