I think that for the first time, Apple has a real performance differentiator in its laptops. They want to highlight that. If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there'

I think that for the first time, Apple has a real performance differentiator in its laptops. They want to highlight that. If Apple is buying Intel CPUs, there's no reason making direct performance comparisons to competitors. They're all building out of the same parts bin. They would want to talk about the form factor and the display - areas where they could often out-do competitors. Now there's actually something to talk about with the CPU/GPU/hardware-performance. I think Apple is also making the comparison to push something else: performance + lifestyle. For me, the implication is that I can buy an Intel laptop that's nicely portable, but a lot slower; I could also buy an Intel laptop that's just as fast, but requires two power adapters to satisfy its massive power drain and really doesn't work as a laptop at all. Or I can buy a MacBook Pro which has the power of the heavy, non-portable Intel laptops while sipping less power than the nicely portable ones. I don't have to make a trade-off between performance and portability. I think people picked apart the comparisons on the M1 and were pretty satisfied. 6-8 M1 performance cores will offer a nice performance boost over 4 M1 performance cores and we basically know how those cores benchmark already. I'd also note that there are efforts to get Linux on Apple Silicon.