I have both, MacBook Air 2019 and Dell XPS 13 2018.
MacBook is stunningly smooth, while under heavy CPU load you hit CMD+Space and Spotlight is there. Under my Dell with no CPU load at all, I hit the windows key - and nothing happens.
What really keeps me at Apple is this overall smoothness. Under Windows/Intel you can pick one spec that is impressive, but as you said, it is the overall experience.
Now this is the case. Before, Dell XPSs were VERY good laptops with same performance for a cheaper price.
And thats not including thermal throttling, the bullshit Apple pulls with background OS stuff like checking executable hashes online, being restricted to what software you can run, and so on.
An Apple MacBook Air with 8Gb RAM 512GB SSD is $1,249[2].
The XPS13 is great, I have one myself with Linux on. They're definitely in the same price range as the Apple laptops though.
I think the other points you've raised have been addressed else where.
There's no restriction on what software you run. You can even replace the OS with Linux if you like by configuring the security.
The hash key transmission seems to be used for malware detection, is optional and Apple have committed to not keeping logs of it when people do use it.
Not sure I’d call that “blowing out of the water”.
I think, for a light weight laptop I’d rather take the single core bump of the air over the marginal gain for multicore of the Asus. That’s just me though.
MacBook is stunningly smooth, while under heavy CPU load you hit CMD+Space and Spotlight is there. Under my Dell with no CPU load at all, I hit the windows key - and nothing happens.
What really keeps me at Apple is this overall smoothness. Under Windows/Intel you can pick one spec that is impressive, but as you said, it is the overall experience.