[alwillis]

I feel like we will see similar performance fairly soon in cheaper laptops without being locked into the Apple ecosystem.

That's probably not going to happen any time soon.

If the $999 M1-based MacBook Air is already outperforming almost every Intel laptop that's been shipping (including Apple's), there's little chance Intel or AMD are going to surpass that.

Even if they get close to performance, they're not going to have the same battery life. From Matthew Panzarino's review on Techcrunch on the M1 MacBook Pro [1]:

"In fullscreen 4k/60 video playback, the M1 fares even better, clocking an easy 20 hours with fixed 50% brightness. On an earlier test, I left the auto-adjust on and it crossed the 24 hour mark easily. Yeah, a full day. That’s an iOS-like milestone."

It's important to remember: this is Apple's low-end chip for entry-level/consumer level hardware, yet it's more than competitive with a $5000 iMac Pro.

[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/17/yeah-apples-m1-macbook-pro...