I think the main difference (besides storage and peripherals) is active cooling. MBA's are passive cooled now (since the original M1) whereas MBP's have always had fans. The M1 & M2 chips are so cool that they generally don't need any active cooling most of the time. Where it does make a difference is under heavy sustained compute workloads. The passively-cooled MBA's will start to throttle under these workloads whereas the MBP's will maintain full speed indefinitely by spinning up the fans.