If you translate, you do face performance issues.
Apple or some other vendor cannot make an ARM chip so fast at a competitive cost
that beats an x86 chip in emulation mode.
The underlying acceleration techniques for both ARM and x86 are the same.
This reminds me of Iron Man 1... "Tony Stark was able to build this in a cave! With a box of scraps! - Well, I'm sorry. I'm not Tony Stark."
Apple has managed to pull it off so well that the M1 blasted an i9 to pieces [1]. The M1 is just so damn well more performant than an Intel i9 that the 20% performance loss compared to native code didn't matter.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2020/11/15/m1-chip-emulating-x86-b...
The use case for the vast majority of laptops include I/O- and memory-bound applications. Very few CPU-bound applications are run on consumer laptops, or even corporate laptops, for the most part. CPU-bound applications should be getting run on ARM or GPU clusters in the cloud.
The use case for an M1 in laptops is the power benchmarks vs. an i9.
Where the M1 just blows anything desktop-Intel out of the water, partially because they integrate a lot of stuff directly on the SoC, partially because they place stuff like RAM or persistent storage extremely close to the SoC whereas on desktop-Intel RAM, storage and peripheral controllers are all dedicated chips.
The downside is obviously that you can't get more than 16GB RAM with an M1 and 24GB RAM with the new M2's and you cannot upgrade either memory at all without a high-risk soldering job [1]... but given that Apple has the persistent storage so closely attached to the SoC to swap around, it doesn't matter all that much.
[1] https://www.macrumors.com/2021/04/06/m1-mac-ram-and-ssd-upgr...