

It’s significant already. If I get the math right (warning, I’m on my phone in bed at 3am and it’s been 10 years) I think that a 1 inch chip running at 3GHz clock rate could, if you aren’t careful with the design of the clock network, end up with half a clock cycle physically fitting on the chip. That is, the trace that was supposed to move the signal from one end of the chip to the other, would instead see the clock signal as a standing wave, not moving at all. (Of course people has (tried?) to make use of that effect. I think it was called “resonant clock distribution” or some such)
I wouldn’t call it “measured in inches” as much as they are “named” with a partly numerical name, which may or may not be an adequate correspondence with a different country’s length scale.
It’s similar with bicycles: many tires are named in inches. Two tires with the same number of “inches” may however not have the same diameter, so to translate size-names into measurements is fraught with pitfalls.