> specs are on-par with a 2-year old smartphone flagship

Cortex-A53 is a low cost, energy efficient, slow, in-order implementation. I don't think it was ever used as the main core in a flagship smartphone. Something like a 2012 ODROID-X2 SBC with its Cortex-A9 cores should have no trouble outperforming it, but it doesn't support AArch64.

> Given Allwinner's history of GPL skirmishes and backdooring

On the other hand, the linux-sunxi community does a pretty good job of bringing mainline support for Allwinner SocS and they're working on the A64. That's probably the longer term plan for the creators of this laptop.