https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/11/microsoft-surface-la...
A14X: (4 big cores and 4 little cores) - 1634 Single Core & 7220 Multi-Core.
If accurate, it looks like a theoretical Macbook Air with this next gen iPad Pro chip would be more than competitive with Microsoft's offering.
Is there any reason to believe Apple won't apply the same pricing strategy to an Apple Silicon Macbook Air?
The reviews for the Surface Go Laptop are hilariously bad, as they are reviewing if it were intended to be a gaming or power user device. That's insane. It's a cheap, small, touchscreen laptop for doing schoolwork and writing Word documents - and probably the best one you can buy in that price range. I got one for my kids; once you uninstall the god-awful Skype and Mail apps, it runs silently all day long. The 3:2 screen makes writing Word documents much nicer than any similarly-sized widescreen laptop. Etc.
Anyway, I don't think that the MacBook Air would be positioned with this is a competitor. Apple tends to avoid this price range.
Moving down to the iPad Pro version of the chip, given it's more than adequate performance, would already leave more pricing wiggle room.