You're buying an established brand to augment yours, regardless of what that brand does. It's a sort of SEO.

In this case, though, I disagree that there was no competition. Ecosystems like Arduino are real threats to large incumbents in adjacent sectors. If all the tooling and products necessary to embedded development end up being easily accessible, expensive options like Qualcomm's become effectively commoditized. Qualcomm basically acted like Bill Gates buying Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net https://simpsons.fandom.com/wiki/Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net