Plus it does it all basically silently and cool instead. No matter what you do. You can’t heat it up, unlike an i7 that can be trivially turned into a hair dryer.
I can’t compare with a chromebook since I haven’t used one of any level ($200 or $1200).
But M1 vs i7 feels like a world of difference too.
The hotter that I got my M1 MBA was when I was converting 131 GB of Flac files to AAC (~3k files). I believe it used all the cores continuously for around 20 minutes. It was still cooler than my old 2015 MBP at normal usage.
Underneath the hype, a Chromebook is still a Linux-powered laptop OS atop whatever reasonably-capable hardware platform one throws at it.