It's a fantastic experience, but in no way has having this laptop for the last 6 months "redefined how I think about a laptop." It still does all the same things a laptop does, it still has all the same limitations a laptop has (like the physically small screen vs. other common gaming choices - be it desktop monitors or TVs). The M1 in the MBA doesn't really change any of that. Especially since the loss of bootcamp & eGPU means the MBA is a rather terrible gaming experience unless something drastically changes between game devs, Apple, and MacOS. The extra battery life is definitely welcome, but it's not game changing revolutionary, either. For some it may now be enough to go all day without charging, which is a key milestone, but many people were already there with the existing set of ultrabooks, too. Beyond that, eh? Kinda like a phone that can last 2 days. Cool trick, but it wouldn't change anything about my day to day life unless there happens to be a power outage overnight.
It also has an AMD 4900HS which while not an M1 is a fantastic processor.
Per anandtech the M1 comes kinda-close sometimes to the 1650 mobile: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
It's then soundly wrecked by the 1660 Ti mobile, and the 2060 MaxQ is then faster yet still. They obviously also take a lot more power at peak, but that's also going to be a huge difference in the actual gaming experience, too.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/16252/mac-mini-apple-m1-teste...
There are people already running 32-bit windows apps through Wine on the M1. When there is a will there is a way.
I have not tried Civ 6 late game benchmarks yet tho ;)
I've owned a few "gaming" laptops, but until the M1 MBA I haven't had one that run games for more than an hour while on battery power, and even then it sounded like a jet taking off.
Software support is another, though Rosetta works surprisingly well, the general lack of Mac support in games combined with the removal of 32-bit support in Catalina mean, you're not exactly spoiled for choice.