It's a good question and really only time will tell, but this same comment was made about these chips in the iPhone: "impressive yes, but would they be able to scale up to power a laptop?" A lot of people said no back then, and yet here we are.
Apple's not stupid and they're not going to slap Intel in the face like this if they're not 100% sure they won't need them again in the future. I'd be willing to bet they already know the answer to these questions (and likely even have 32/64GB M1s running in their labs). There's just no way they'd go into something like this blindly.