Edit: various benchmarks seem to show the M1 Max games at about the FPS of a RTX 3060L (though with lower power). It's around the same price as a similarly spec'd 3060L gaming laptop.
Also M1 Max seems to be on the order of a £1000 more than a 3080 equipped laptop, where are you getting that figure from?
I also got irked by their comparison to old baseline gpu perf. Everyone knows intels integrated gpu is terrible, so comparing to that is pointless.
It's also not a ticking time bomb, since the SSD can be changed without sending the device into apple to change the entire CPU/SSD/GPU combo. Every one of these apple devices basically has planned obsolescence built in.
If you care about having 20 hours of battery life instead of 8-10, the m1 is definitely going to win that. But from a pure performance perspective there are chips on the market faster than the m1 in the laptop sphere from AMD already.
If you get an zephyrus with an AMD cpu and a dedicated GPU you will pay less than the macbook pro and be more performant, in exchange for a hotter laptop with lower battery life. But that's just a tradeoff, not necessarily a win one way or another. I've never needed 20 hours of battery life and I don't prioritize it. 8-10 is enough for me. I'd rather have the faster machine.
And I can change the SSD or RAM myself without expecting it to make itself implode later in its lifespan because its all in one package as the apple silicon is.