I mean, that's never been true. Hell, MacOS runs fine on pretty much any computer, as evidenced by the cakewalk that is the modern Hackintosh. In the Intel era, Macs consistently lost outright price-to-performance battles with equivalent PCs, and the same goes for the PowerPC era.
Instead of arguing with you though, I'll propose an amendment to your phrase: "Apple's lead in software makes their hardware profitable."
Because you expanded the scope to "Apple's software", which includes MacOS. You could have said "Apple Watch hardware drives WatchOS" if you wanted to talk about the Apple Watch, but it sounded to me like you were addressing Apple, not their watch.
You're grasping. I've been very clearly talking about the Apple Watch this entire time. Read my posts. You're the one going down blue bubble rabbit holes.
Though since you're adamant on expanding the scope here, I do believe Apple Silicon has long been driving their software advantage in not just the Watch, but all their mobile offerings. And now going forward, with the arrival of the M1, we're starting to see similar performance and battery life advantages for the Mac.
Seems to me like you're just looking for opportunities to rail about Apple in general. Everyone needs a way to blow off steam, you do you brother.
I don't think he is grasping... You quite clearly indicated the entirety of Apple in the comment. If you did not mean to do this you should have written the Apple watch specifically. It's not like the comment would have been any longer.
Instead of arguing with you though, I'll propose an amendment to your phrase: "Apple's lead in software makes their hardware profitable."
Does that contextualize things for you?