Nintendo didn’t just take their time bringing the SNES to the west, SEGA released the Mega Drive in Japan in 1988, and the Super Famicom wasn’t released until 1990.
The Genesis released in the US a full year before the Japanese release of the Super Famicom, in 1989! They only had NEC’s bungled TurboGrafx launch to deal with for two years before the SNES was launched in the US.
Yeah; I think Sega have their arcade hardware development team to think for that. Aside from just the Genesis/MegaDrive being based on System 16; the turnaround time from Master System (which was notably more capable than Famicom/NES tho it did come out a bit later) to MegaDrive/Genesis was very quick. I think if they waited a little later they could've had sprite scaling & rotation hardware built into the system but it's also arguable they would've been too late and released too close to SNES/Super Famicom, particularly in Japan.
Though since the head-start did little for them in Japan anyway, maybe holding off a Japanese release until late 1989/early 1990 with a Western release around Fall 1990 (still a year ahead of SNES) would've been better if they could've gotten some extra hardware in there, and avoid resorting to stuff like the Mega/Sega CD and especially the 32X.