You're both right, but they're more right because the subtle difference you mention is the problem they're highlighting: Apple went out of their way to be unclear and create subtle differences in interpretation that would be favorable to Apple, as a company should.
After the odd graphs/numbers from the event, I was worried it was going to be an awful ~2 year period of jumping to conclusions based on:
- Geekbench scores
- "It's slow because Rosetta"
- HW comparisons that compare against ancient hardware because "[the more powerful PC equivalent] uses _too_ much power" implying that "[M1] against 4 year old HW is just the right amount of power", erasing the tradeoff between powerfulness and power consumption
The people claiming this blows Intel/AMD out of the water need to have stronger evidence than comparing against parts launched years ago for budget consumers, then waving away any other alternative based on power consumption.[1]
Trading off power for power consumption is an inherent property of chip design, refusing to consider other chipsets because they have a different set of tradeoffs mean you're talking about power consumption alone, not the chip design.
[1] n.b. this is irrational because the 4 year old part is likely to use more power than the current part. So, why is it more valid to compare against the 4 year old part? Following this logic, we need to find a low power GPU, not throw out the current part and bring in a 4 year old budget part.