Apple’s forced deprecation back at it again. They claim to care about the environment and for reasons other than technical decide not to support Intel devices (even though they still sell them TODAY!)
They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.
The day they stop selling Intel Macs, there will be an uproar from people who claimed that X months was not enough time to refresh their workplace's MacBooks--which need to be Intel because in spite of Rosetta 2 and the speed at which libraries and apps are being recompiled there's still some obscure thing that doesn't work yet on M1. They're kinda damned if they do, damned if they don't.
But enough of that, let's look at whether they decided this "for reasons other than technical". A lot of the features (the FaceTime image processing, the dictation and speech stuff, etc.) seem like the kind of thing that was built against their Neural Engine. Intel CPUs don't have custom circuitry for running neural nets, let alone an API that is congruent with Apple's. It makes sense that computers with certain advanced hardware are going to get features that other computers without equivalent hardware can't support.
Is it possible to use virtualization and x86 emulation at the same time now? I’d gotten the impression that people didn’t think that was ever going to happen, and it seems like a pretty non-obscure reason to want Intel support to continue.
They're only not supporting new features which have specific requirements of the device — the features it had when you bought it are still supported. The listed hardware support goes back to 2015 and historically they've continued shipping security and stability updates for the previous OS release, so whichever of those old devices are still running won't leave security support until the release of whatever comes _after_ Monterrey (presumably in the fall of 2022) when Big Sur falls out of support.