ARM is a mobile architecture, ground up, always has been, not a desktop one, it’s being scaled and shoehorned into a Desktop Platform, which for Apple, aside from old Mac Pro’s, their desktops were mobiles in disguise anyways, so that’s just how they roll and the products are generally great but probably best described as “desktop class”, not true desktop workstations.

As far as grunt, yes Intel can keep up in “horsepower”, albeit with vastly higher power consumption and massively higher heat production and needing a large dedicated GPU in the mix as well to keep up benchmark and rendering wise.

However, and I own both an M2 notebook and custom Intel Desktop PC, and have used an M3 for a few days, and the absolutely savage overall responsiveness of the M series SOCs are in a league of their own, and it’s been that way since M1 and keeps getting better with each update.

Having essentially your entire system on die brings a usability experience to the table that you have to daily drive to really understand. I love my PC, and I love my M2, but for very different reasons, and they truly don’t compare well in my opinion. They have generally entirely different use cases and markets that they are both well suited for.