>gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones

That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.

To give credit where it is due, I remember one member from the project mentioning that Apple actually did quite stellar work to enable other OSs while still maintaining a secure booting mechanism (for both osx and future third party ones!)

Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a MacBook to use as my daily driver

The final element of my decision to buy my first MacBook (after being very anti-Apple for years) was the existence of Asahi.

Are you already using Asahi on it? Would love to hear/read (if you've written it somewhere else) some feedback about your experience as I'm considering this path as well. A dual-boot would be most excellent!

Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?

No, I am at a new job, so I don't have time for such fun (at least until the new company MacBook Pro arrives). Just knowing that the work seems to be moving forward was enough for me.