I doubt that Win RT tablets will take off. They’re a no man’s land type product. The ARM CPUs are still too wimpy for desktop grade work, and even the latest incarnations aren’t anywhere near the capability of the latest Atom products.

Yes, the top of the line ARM chips are rivaling Intel ATOMs. Though whether that stays the case next year remains to be seen as Intel is coming out with the 22nm Silvermont update, which combines another FAB shrink with the first major architectural update since the ATOM was first introduced.

So potentially it could mean as big a update as say if ARM had gone straight from Cortex A8 to A15 and skipped A9 altogether. Though even if it turns out to be less than that they’re going to update again in 2014 with the 14nm Airmont update.

Meawhile, Medfield proved good enough to hold its own against dual core 1GHz Cortex A9 devices and the upcoming Clover Trail is basically a dual core version that also should be clocked a bit faster.

Basically, the Medfield is a single core ATOM clocked at 1.3GHz (1.6GHz with Burst Mode). While the Clover Trail is replacing the Oak Trail for a probably 1.5GHz dual core solution.

Both are SoC designs and Clover Trail is getting similar power optimizations as Medfield introduced. So we can likely expect pretty close to ARM like run times.

While performance may not exceed top of the line ARM but being able to run x86 software and generally being more flexible should still give them at least a small edge until the next gen 22nm Silvermont can come out by med 2013.

As for WinRT, mind that they’ll likely be used like netbooks and Metro apps can be configured to run from WP8 on up to full Windows 8. So depends on how popular and useful those cross compatible apps will be.

You don’t really need to do everything you can with a more power system when on the go after all and having something a bit more useful than a Smart Phone can be a viable product category.