See, here's where the undefined nature of things comes in. "Comparably spec'd" needs to be conditioned on what task you're aiming for.
A "pure gold hammer" is a terrible idea and would also be terribly expensive. But asking for a "comparably spec'd" hammer presumes the absurd premise that the material of the hammer must be kept consistent regardless of its intended use just for the purpose of being comparable.
To preface, I totally understand the value proposition of Apple devices for some use cases, but it is important to recognize that they are aiming for certain workloads.
As examples:
I have one friend that runs virtualization workloads that require a lot of memory, a lot of storage, a lot of cores, but they don't really care about memory bandwidth, "having a display", or even the noise of the device. An older server with 192G of RAM, 24 cores and >8TB of storage can easily be had and upgraded within $1k, whereas a "comparable" Mac Pro costs upwards of $10k! (Of course nobody would use a Mac Pro for this workload, so the comparison is moot)
I also have friends that are digital artists. They care about having a high brightness and color accuracy display but otherwise don't do anything that taxes the computer. They also appreciate having high quality speakers and long battery life. Some of them run M1 Macbook Airs at the lowest 8G memory configuration for ~$800 (discounted new from other retailers) + a digitizer for ~$100, while the closest comparable non-Apple laptops are all premium devices upwards of $1.5k and even then they are still worse in the battery department!
As for myself, I do light dev work, virtualization, gaming, but also travel a lot and present at conferences. I use a GPD Win Max 2 for a little over $1k (early Indiegogo pricing). The closest Apple offering would be a 14" MBP, and configured as needed (32GB/2T) would be about $3800 and still be short a 4G modem and a couple of extra devices like a digitizer, game controller, and dongle for USB-A. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Can't win 'em all.