It is kind of crazy.

There's good reason there isn't an all-radio chip on the market. They are hard to make and even harder to make without patent infringement and opening yourself up to billions in liability. If your all-in-one chip isn't good at the "all" part then it's worthless.

Radio is hard. Apple wasted a ton of money into building a cellular chip only to continue to buy from Qualcomm. Oh, and they also lost big in court too! Apple had originally planned on using their own cellular chips half a decade ago. I wouldn't venture to guess how much money they've already pissed away on this venture with nothing to show for it yet.

It only makes sense to even attempt this if you have an unlimited development budget, have a legal team that can tiptoe around the field of IP landmines, can wait years on end before going to market and even then only if you are confident you can sell a billion of these.

It's pretty much something that doesn't make sense for anyone on the planet but Apple or Huawei to attempt.

It's not going to let Apple make better gadgets. It's that Apple is at a scale where they find themselves tired of paying tens of billions of dollars for Qualcomm and Broadcom stuff. For other companies, a risky multi-billion dollar bet and a bunch of high profile IP lawsuits just to make a single component that isn't related to your core competency for one of your products instead of just buying it from a vendor is a terrible idea.