spiral They've had it long before Pixels but it's been getting bypassed. These companies are successfully bypassing secure element throttling from Apple for years along with the recent Samsung and more recent Qualcomm implementation.
Pixel 2 introduced this for Pixels, with an NXP secure element, Pixel 3 moved to a custom ARM secure element. Pixel 6 moved to a custom RISC-V secure element a while after the launch of the OpenTitan project Google is heavily involved in that's developing open source RISC-V secure elements. Moving away from the standard ARM Cortex secure element cores appears to have blocked these companies from successfully exploiting the secure element for several years. That's a huge success since these companies have a lot of resources and are heavily targeting Pixels due to their widespread use among people who want private phones, far beyond this kind of privacy community. iPhones having far more overall users doesn't necessarily mean they care about them more. They'll likely eventually find a way to exploit it, which is why it's a good idea for people to use a strong passphrase.
Our 2-factor fingerprint unlock feature will allow people to combine a strong passphrase with convenient fingerprint+PIN unlock to get the best of both worlds. We expect that to massively increase the proportion of our users using a strong passphrase, especially when we add our planned UI for generating random passphrases automatically where it can give you a few choices and you pick the one you like.