Ok, I believe you're being sarcastic, because this little paragraph is ridiculous, so I'll address it as if you are - because then you have a very good point.
This is Apple's Pro line. There is no more performant laptop that they make. It's a portable workstation - a home tower that you can take with you. If people want battery life of 10+ hours or a light weight, they get the model optimized for that. Apple seems to not offer a real pro laptop (portable workstation) - period. People who use these pro laptops are either compiling code or doing heavy graphics.
Work gives us Dell Precision laptops with 9 hours battery life during casual use, a pretty dang powerful discreet GPU, and oh - Xeon CPUs. No offense apple, but this "pro" laptop is a toy in comparison.
So I don't get it - apple's plan. I couldn't seriously use their products for work unless I want to lose productivity. Why don't they make something that's actually "pro" instead of calling what everyone else calls mid-tier a "pro" and then completely excluding the actual pro target market all together. Do they just not want more money?
As a developer, waiting less time for your device to finish an operation, while sitting there reading HN, makes you not need as much battery life. And the Dell seems designed for a full workday plus an hour. Now, I'm not a dev - did that for a year of my 20+ year career, too much sitting looking at code. I do however script a lot - with gigs of text output from data collection of logs and performance data, usually doing basic calculations or transformations. I look a lot at large datasets and graph them. I need a big GPU, I need fast CPUs. I mount up a 20G RAM drive because the disk is too slow.
Now yeah - when compared to another Apple laptop w/ a Xeon, the M1 is faster for single threaded specialized workloads. Because Apple uses CPUs a generation behind everyone else, has worse cooling, and still loses on multicore. In real life, when I run a shell script on my laptop, and a coworker runs it on the same dataset on an M1, his is an all day run - he does it overnight. I do it over a long lunch - it's not even a real comparison.
Now yes - My laptop gets hot, fans are blasting, and if my charge is at 80%, it literally won't charge while the script is running. But... that's what I want from a "pro." Now, his isn't a pro, and it stays barely warm. But we're talking the difference between 7 hours and 2 hours here. I don't think the "pro" is going to be all that much better.
So I get the apples to old apples comparison. However apples to flagships from others - I highly doubt apple a serious contender for the portable workstation. Which is what "pro" should be.