"After how many years and how many revisions of the ARM ISA did Intel step in with XScale"
You mean their next generation StrongArm? Admittedly they lost a lot of the key StrongArm designers when they took it over, but it's not like it was totally a blank sheet.
The DSP portion of XScale wasn't in the StrongArm, and neither was the MMC controller, but pretty much everything else on XScale is brought over from StrongArm. Ok, ok, the USB controller can be used as a host, unlike StrongArm's. But they did mess up the memory controller.