If Lenovo would ship Coreboot Linux laptops that would fit the bill as premium and good laptop with open boot loader.
Apple has also made some poor decisions in various areas in the past like poor thermals, power-sucking dGPUs, and of course the butterfly keyboard. The M1 Macbook is very nearly perfect though, and I don't know how any of the PC vendors are going to top it.
I do often look at a ThinkPad and wonder, though.
I'm just past the point in my life where I want to itemize this stuff. Take my money and give me the best package possible. I've got better things to do with my time.
The entire buying experience also feels very sales-like - which, yes, it's absolutely a sales process - but the buying experience with Apple is leagues better and feels more human. This isn't even hardware, but website UI/UX... why on earth is it like this in 2020? This is much easier to solve than hardware chain issues.
Unfortunately, there’s no retailer out there that I trust to actually display these high-end laptops so you can go actually get a feel for them. The Microsoft Stores was the best bet, but those are all closing. I shopped for an all-metal laptop 2 years ago after leaving Airbnb and was wholly disappointed with this $600-$1400 lineup at BestBuy. I ended up getting a Huawei Matebook Pro X (sic) from the Microsoft Store in San Francisco. I put Linux on it, but were I to do it again I’d just spend 2x more on an actual MacBook.
That said, to me the existence of the Matebook _proves_ that what I'm after should be possible, and it just comes down to nobody actually doing it.