I am not sure what world you live in? Their entry-level chip (the M1) beats workstation-class AMD CPUs like the Ryzen 3700X in most benchmarks, while being passively cooled and using 15W for the whole SOC, while the 3700X uses at least 65W for the CPU alone and requires a large cooling block. All while being passively cooled.
In matrix multiplication workloads, that same entry-level CPU is roughly as fast as a 12 core Ryzen 5900X, while using only 7.5W (the 5900X pretty much goes up to 105W for the same workload).
And all that while delivering stellar battery life.
You can hate Apple for their politics, walled-garden approach, etc. But your comment completely mischaracterizes the engineering feat of M1 CPUs. They have gone from having no presence on laptops/desktops to setting the gold standard for performance per watt.
At any rate, this is all besides the point. Even when Apple was still on 7nm, their iPhone/iPad CPUs were already competitive with Intel parts at much better performance per watt (an also left Qualcomm et al. far behind). It has been clear for a few years already that your point that
to make a CPU that's just barely competitive with the rest of the market
is nonsense.
I don't hate Apple because they're a "design and marketing" company; those just happen to be what they're best at. I hate them because they're lazy, they waste money and spend every drop of goodwill they ascertain on locking in consumers, reducing the choice they have inside their ecosystem and raising the wall around their garden. Apple is a company driven by the same ethos that ruined Microsoft 10 years ago, and their reckoning is fast-approaching. The M1 still can't run a ton of software. It is the compatibility underdog, and the x86 developers of the world (at least speaking anecdotally here) simply don't care.
Apple is still not the best chip designer (Nvidia and even AMD nowadays have them beat there), and their marketing is only powerful because they can say whatever they want and people will buy it anyways. You're right on one account though; nobody else markets like they do.