The difficulty here is Microsoft is staking a fair bit on this. To some extent, their ability to make ARM their future is dependent on this push succeeding in g

The difficulty here is Microsoft is staking a fair bit on this. To some extent, their ability to make ARM their future is dependent on this push succeeding in getting people to swap to it. AMD/Intel can always just lose gracefully and go again next year. For Microsoft trying to decide how much they're investing in ARM, going all in on "we're better than the Macbook Air" when there's a good chance Apple is going to blow them out of the water in a few weeks is a much bigger gamble. It's possible Apple's announcements aren't that impressive in some dimension, but even if it's in the same range, it could really dampen Microsoft's push here.