If you want to run any software besides what's on the iOS App Store, you need a 64-bit x86 CPU. Apple hasn't released a macOS toolchain for ARM yet, and they need to do that a couple years before releasing such a computer. Otherwise their computer will launch with zero third-party applications (besides the open source ones available on brew).
I remember the Rosetta era when they switched from PPC to Intel and had their VM layer inbetween. You could go to your process list and see what was using x86 vs PPC via Rosetta and later even x86 64-bit. Eventually Rosetta was removed from the default install and I think it's gone entirely now, so you can't run really old PPC apps without an older version of MacOS and an older Mac.
A Rosetta equivalent that runs x86 on ARM is way harder from a pure technical perspective than running PPC on x86. Going from a weak memory model to a strong one is waaaaay easier than the reverse.
Except isn't X86_64 ISA technically property of AMD, not Intel?
I know some of the later stuff (SIMD / AVX / SSE / etc) is Intel, but technically I think they could leave that off and still be successful assuming that would be all that's needed to not be infringing (which I don't know if that's the case or not).
Software emulation is fine (otherwise QEMU would be pretty dead), it's just hardware accelerated emulation and actual HW implementations of the ISA that Intel does not like.
The A11 may need to thermal throttle right after the benchmark completes (which is actually reasonable for many workloads, but games).
IIRC the previous gen A10x in the iPad Pro beat some low-end macs, and usually the next gen non-x is a bit faster than the previous gen x... so, I'd expect the A11 to be faster than some low-end macs.
Could Apple be arranging 3rd party conversions in secret? Or, could the conversion be done seamlessly, at the compiler level?
Anyway, I think ARM macs have been on the cards for a few years now... in a way, the iPad Pro can be seen as a way of experimenting with Mac-level power, as a preparatory step.
Their hesitation might partly be due to a kind of identity crisis: if we can develop iOS apps on a Mac, and that Mac is ARM, why can't we develop on an iOS device itself? But Apple doesn't want open iOS devices.
This is just speculation since I don't own an iPad Pro but I read a comment on reddit that during the beta version of the latest iOS the iPad Pro had thermal management issues where it would get very hot quickly. Could it be that apple is intentionally removing thermal throttling at launch and then enables it after a month to cheat benchmarks and reviews?
I think it's more likely that one of the purposes of the beta was to determine when thermal throttling was ideal, given real-world workloads (which are hard to fine-tune without knowing exactly how people will use it).
It's a pity thermal throttling is necessary; but at least in a Mac form-factor, there would be more cooling options.
I did check the Geekbench scores, because I was curious about your speed claims... https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/search?utf8=&q=7360u and https://browser.geekbench.com/ios-benchmarks/ seem way too close to equal for me to believe. Maybe that's the way it is, but I'm assuming I'm misunderstanding the tests. The A11 couldn't possibly be that fast, could it?