One early benchmark showed allocating and destroying an NSObject performing drastically better on the M1 vs recent Intel Macs. This wasn’t an accident. It’s probably not representative of performance overall. They have enough vertical integration to make their own first party solutions clear optimization targets.
All it takes is looking at what's going on in commonly used code, deciding to optimize for X, Y, and Z, and commit to it. If Intel isn't doing this already, that's all the fault of current management for not making it a priority.
The only way that Apple's vertical integration helped them make that management decision is that they were able to say "our customer is a typical laptop user." Intel tries to cater to much larger markets, so perhaps when management goes to plan a laptop chip, they are less aggressive with deciding to optimize. But I have a feeling that Apple's optimizations are generally good for nearly all code, not just for specific use cases.
Don't discount how a weak organization can make poor decisions even when all necessary information seems to be readily available.
They could run their benchmarks on the Debian repository and it would probably be representative enough.
If they haven't done so, perhaps because it seemed tedious or unimportant, well, that mistake would be on them.
Even if you know about them, you need an expert in each to truly push the hardware to the real limits that get hit in the respective industry. The small differences between real implementations and simulated loads can drastically alter the performance characteristics and cause proc manufacturers to miss the mark.