@Kebabbert ...yes the x86 emulation was removed
But that didn't stop the fact that the first gen itanics really disappointed on the performance front which didn't help the marketing of later chips against x64. And although some parts of IA64 could be targeted by a decent compiler... e.g. the large register banks, some predication, register calling; other parts just really couldn't be, at least not generically, e.g. ld.chk, register bank rotation, multiple floating point states. Arguably also, code that isn't fairly carefully written isn't that amenable even to VLIW. One does wonder whether the power/performance ratios couldn't have been better with a less is more ISA that was very carefully targeted on what compilers could do with existing large code-bases....
It really seems as if a bunch of gee-wiz computer science-y types built this as a science project rather than a set of bloody minded "How many transistors are we spending for that, what does that really get us?" computer engineers.
Ultimately, the thing that will unseat x86 is power, you can look at it as losing cores (lost performance) or you can look at it as a bunch of logic that can't be independently power-managed since its difficult to shut down a part of your instruction decode pipeline. ARM hasn't really been targeted yet at the performance end of the spectrum, it's just not their niche, but, you can't help wondering what happens as the performance of ARM inches upward and more software gets ported to it.