I think it's interesting, you are not just paying for speed, you are paying for a compromise, because the speed is gained through complexity, which not only increases the chance of error (by design or implementation) but in the case of a high degree of speculative execution can translate into worse performance per watt. In short, it's the whole "more is less" thing.

Very good point. Apparently including at least one compromise that most people (probably including the engineers who designed the CPUs) didn't know they were making.