I replaced a 16" i9 MacBook Pro with an M1 MacBook Air right after it was released. The Air was at least as fast as the MBP running full tilt with my workloads.

I replaced a 16" i9 MacBook Pro with an M1 MacBook Air right after it was released. The Air was at least as fast as the MBP running full tilt with my workloads. The Air has no fan so it's completely silent and I've rarely experienced any thermal throttling on it. The i9 MBP's fans would spin up if you looked at it sideways and running full out sounded like a jet engine. The Air also lasts all day on the battery at a fraction of the weight and a fraction of the thickness of the MBP it replaced. The M-series chips beat a lot of Intel and AMD offerings in some form factors. It's not that the greatest chip of all time and there's Intel and AMD offerings that beat them in single thread performance or offer more multi thread performance at some price points. At the high end I think Intel and AMD (plus GPU) are more competitive with Apple's kit so long as the OEM makes nice hardware. At the low end the entry level M2s have ridiculous capability compared to x86 machines. Maybe Qualcomm will actually be in the running with the Snapdragon X if they can ditch the Windows millstone.