Yes kudos to apple for delivering astonishing performance and performance/watt, but to use these chips you'll have to accept Apple's full embrace - the chip, the device it powers, the OS, the app ecosystem and restrictions.
Even previous gen Mac Mini's with the T2 chip made it difficult to reinstall even MacOS due to Find My Mac.
To turn the phrase, there’s a lot of innovation in the M1 that only Apple can do.
There’s also a downside to being a walled garden, Apple is building itself a Great Wall, but the barbarians eventually got the better tech. So for example, AMD and NVIDIA GPUs have Directx ray tracing. How many generations before Apple GPUs catch up with Ampere or RDNA3?
To some extent having the GPU architectures discrete allows them to iterate much faster as they aren’t tied to other dependencies, or left with inferior thermal and power constraints.
But I think a lot of people are more concerned with Perf/$ and Perf/Watt and will find Apple’s fully integrated approach is extremely hard to beat or even compete with.
In this case perf/$ is going to provide Apple an unbeatable margin, not necessarily the consumer an unbeatable price.