Let's set the stage here though; the most powerful, affluent company in the world made a new chip on silicon that could not be fabricated or bought by any other manufacturers in the world. This new CPU runs a foreign architecture, refuses to run x86 code unless recompiled into "native" instructions. Their decades-old chip manufacturing team manages to make a CPU that's just barely competitive with the rest of the market and... has slightly better battery life? Is it uncouth to say that I was expecting a little more here from the biggest company in the world?

I don't hate Apple because they're a "design and marketing" company; those just happen to be what they're best at. I hate them because they're lazy, they waste money and spend every drop of goodwill they ascertain on locking in consumers, reducing the choice they have inside their ecosystem and raising the wall around their garden. Apple is a company driven by the same ethos that ruined Microsoft 10 years ago, and their reckoning is fast-approaching. The M1 still can't run a ton of software. It is the compatibility underdog, and the x86 developers of the world (at least speaking anecdotally here) simply don't care.

Apple is still not the best chip designer (Nvidia and even AMD nowadays have them beat there), and their marketing is only powerful because they can say whatever they want and people will buy it anyways. You're right on one account though; nobody else markets like they do.