I'm not aware of any machines with comparable performance/efficiency from any other vendor. Apple officially supports running your own kernels on these machine

I'm not aware of any machines with comparable performance/efficiency from any other vendor. Apple officially supports running your own kernels on these machines. This isn't a jailbreak, it's an official feature of the hardware and firmware design that Apple added, and which their EULA allows you to use in this way. These machines are also not brickable, you can always do a DFU restore from macOS or (soon; Monterey needs some stuff I already figured out but haven't implemented yet, but it works for older versions on the M1s) Linux using idevicerestore, no matter how much you wipe or screw up. (That said, I wouldn't recommend wiping macOS at this stage; we expect most users to have a dual-boot setup.)