Depends on what they're doing with the machine. For casual use, Intel is perfectly fine and you do get some x86 benefits too. I have M1 Pro for work, personal M2 mac mini and typing this on 16" Intel MBP, watched the presentation live and still not convinced I need to upgrade my casual browsing and light programing machine this year. Battery is at 500 cycles and 84% health, still lasts 4 hours.

Exactly! I have a 2012 MBP and a 2015 MBP that are still kicking and work perfectly for my kids playing Roblox or Minecraft and any web browsing we want to do with a proper keyboard.

It really, really was. I’d been used to barely-noticeable performance gains for a decade or more. The responsiveness under load of the M1s made them feel like a decade of performance improvements overnight.

This was especially true with Apple/Intel thermal envelope, I don't know of any other manufacturer that purposefully ran their CPUs to the point of throttling just to keep fan noise down, and in such thin machines with wafer thin heatsinks for design aesthetics. I think they made the last few gens of Intel they used worse than they were (to be fair Intel did have poor TDP till recent 12th Gen)

But how will I ever survive without my touchbar?

Maybe an aftermarket keyboard? I know you're not serious but aftermarket keyboards some of them have little OLED inside the keys. Also somehow the Apple vision Pro headset might provide you with that one extra awkward step needed to accomplish a task interface that it seems like you might be humorously craving.

I've got an M1 mini already, so it's good to have the Intel MBP around in case I need that for whatever reason. Onboard USB-A is also nice to have.