You've got to give them credit. They were able to manufacture decent processors for under half the cost of "the other two". By decent I mean "decent overall performance"... they were not chips for gamers.
The used a series of smart tricks the make the chips inexpensive and fast(er). The first being the addage of a buttload of on-chip cache; they could then lower the clock while maintaining most of the performance -- this is where the PR ratings came in. The second as to have a purly emulated FPU; they used the main processor to emulate a Floating Point Unit -- lowered costs dramatically, but totally soaked the performance.
We're all happy that the Cyrix III and IV have *real* FPUs, now.