Absolutely. Apple's R&D budget for 2025 was 34 Billion to Intel's ~18 Billion (and the majority of Intel's R&D budget goes to architecture, while for Apple, that is all TSMC R&D and Apple pays TSMC another ~$20 billion a year, of which, something like 8 billion is probably TSMC R&D that goes into apple's chips).

Sure not all of Apple's 34B is CPU R&D, but on a like-for-like basis, Apple probably has at least 50% more chip design budget (and they only make ~10-20 different chips a year compared to Intel who make ~100-200)

Imo this is pretty misguided. If you're writing above assembly level, you can read the performance optimization manual for Intel, and that code will also be really fast on AMD (or even apple/graviton). At the assembly level, compilers need to know a little bit more, but mostly those are small details and if they get roughly the right metrics, the code they produce is pretty good.

This is hard to square with the reality that hybrid systems are already widely deployed while pure PQC aren't/

Hybrid has essentially no cost, so we should favor it as long as it has a greater than negligible chance of providing protection. IMO the likelihood of CRQCs breaking ECC is pretty high (>50% by 2040) and the odds of classically breaking lattices is low (<1% by 2050), but creating a 0.5% chance of breaking cryptography for the entire world seems way to high when we have a free mitigation right here.