Yes, they had to pay Qualcomm for their LTE patents, but that didn't mean they had to use Qualcomm SoCs.
Other devices (e.g. Galaxy Nexus, Droid Bionic, HTC One X+) married Qualcomm LTE radios with non-Qualcomm SoCs. Even Samsung did this for a few devices (e.g. Galaxy Note and Note 2 LTE, a few S2 and S3 variants), but, until this year, that was a small and shrinking portion of their lineup.
Qualcomm's past engineering success was a big part of the reason why. Samsung/ARM's engineering failures (e.g. big.LITTLE and cache coherency issues with the original Exynos Octa) were the another part of the reason, but I don't think that changes the overall picture.
I call this BS sorry. I do not know the exact reason why samsung had to release the previous phones using qualcomm's cpus but it was not because snapdragon 805 was a better chip. Quite the opposite if you check the benchmarks for snapdragon vs exynos. Exynos wins not by a higher margin but still wins.
