While it's indeed good to have a healthy skepticism towards these things, there's a major difference between the two: a) MIPS has been acquired too many times by a company that can lock others out (SGI is definitely the Nvidia of today outside of consumer stuff), and b) MIPS, while have been present in game consoles and workstations, didn't really have the visibility ARM has today. They didn't have any consumer devices labelled with "MIPS chipset inside!", even though it was present in game consoles.