Sadly you can't take advantages of Apple's CPU designs unless you buy into their ecosystem. Here's hoping ASAHI linux (Marcan's port to the M1) goes well.
There's little things like ditching the 32 bit ISA, not a big deal, but does make each new iteration that much easier from a design and testing standpoint.
ARM also has a loser memory model, which makes it easier to use more effectively use existing bandwidth.
But there's no magic. It's a straight up aggressive design, wide instruction decode (yes that's easier for arm than x86-64), large re-order buffer, wide issue, etc. Anandtech has a nice summary comparing various M1 features to the Intel and AMD competition. Apple has a high IPC and they make the most of their lower clocks (usually around 3.2 GHz). The chips from Intel/AMD that they are compared against are often in the 4-5 GHz range and burn significantly more power because of that.