So which past features were equivalent to RT?
With SER, Nvidia is already quoting a 44% improvement in Cyberpunk's new ray tracing mode and a 29% improvement in Portal RTX. So the premise about >2X being impossible may be wrong even on Nvidia hardware.
However Nvidia already accelerate more of the RT pipeline, and are already 2X faster or more in RT alone. All AMD need to do to is close the gap a little, for example by adding hardware acceleration of ray traversal, which Intel managed on their first generation of RT hardware! Again, if they are 2X faster in rasterization, *any* reduction to the cost of ray tracing will increase performance by >2X. So essentially your claim must be that it's just impossible for AMD to improve their ray tracing capabilities and Intel has them beat.