Most people I've seen use laptops near chargers, or at least within 2 hours of the nearest charging opportunity. Sometimes people travel and need more, but I don't think it's that common to need eight hours of charge at maximum performance.
Don't get me wrong, the M1 is an engineering marvel and as Apple's competitors move to a similar node size I hope they too will get these power usage benefits some way or another, but I don't think the average consumer needs all the features the M1 offers.
If Intel can come up with a laptop that's faster than the M1 at two thirds the price with the only downside being that you only get four hours of battery out of it with all cores clocked to their limit, then I don't see why most people who need the horsepower would pay extra for the M1, especially with its restrictions on what operating systems it can run comfortably. The impressive efficiency of the M1 simply isn't that pressing a matter for most people.
I hope Intel is right, and I hope they beat Apple. We've seen AMD overtake Intel and then saw their innovations slow to a crawl while they were ahead. Apple might end up doing the very same if there is no competition in this space. If Intel, AMD or Qualcom produce a chip even better than the M1, we can all only stand to gain from this.