I agree with the bulk of what you're saying -- especially about practical considerations involving the software ecosystem and advantages of moving slowly, but I

I agree with the bulk of what you're saying -- especially about practical considerations involving the software ecosystem and advantages of moving slowly, but I do believe there are some workloads where I'd prefer a hotter machine with more (and not shared) memory. I think one of the advantages of M1 is its single-thread access to lots of RAM. That advantage kind of starts to fall off when your workload is heavily multi-threaded, which is often the case for buyers of larger machines with more compute cores. I also believe that the advantages of low power consumption (or equivalently, thermal efficiency) fall off a little bit when you have a larger thermal envelope, because with a larger device (A) you can fit better cooling, and (B) bursts of compute take a longer time to bring the device to throttle temperatures.