As usual with Apple's products, Apple is hardly ever the first one to do thing X. What they are is that they are usually the first ones to do the thing X so well that the public will adopt it. And that's what matters in the end, not who was first.
The big differenc is, following Apple's announcement, that they want to avoid that the users even realize there is an Arm CPU inside.
My dad had a Surface RT a few years ago (I cannot recall how long exactly). But you definitely did realize something was "different" with this thing.
I think Apple has a better chance at achieving this broad acceptance than MS has because they have a lot more control over their ecosystem and hardware. People actually seem to use their frameworks for building apps, for App Store as well as direct downloads. Unlike Microsoft who still has not managed to convince developers to move to UWP apps.
I actually don't hate using the Mac App store on my machine, but I haven't used the Microsoft Store ever since I first tried it. And for lots of more casual users, they probably actually won't realize that there is a difference between the architectures.
