Very exciting. Linux on an M1 would be my dream laptop. The best Linux laptop experience I had was when when the old MacBook Air worked well with Linux.
So when can I install a distro?
Considering that this is just to support the CPU, the next step is the GPU before you'll have anything meaningful running, probably still have a long wait.
GPU can run in a stripped down vm
I believe it is just a frame buffer they have running. Nothing accelerated, which is what most people think of when they want to run a distro.