The thinkpad carbon x1 has been a dream for me, I highly recommend it to my nerdy and lost Macbook brethren. However, I'm already on linux and have lived life out of emacs for decades, so I am biased.
The folks that have invested in the Apple ecosystem are the most fucked - it's difficult to actually replace each part, and I don't begrudge anyone for deciding that spending $$$ instead of time is a good trade off.