Not surprised your ThinkBook is beating the M1 MacBook since you crippled the Mac with 8GB of RAM.
I love the M1, it's a great work machine, I have very few complaints about it. I hardly ever hit 100% memory usage, and if I do - it's thanks to either Chrome/Spotify/Teams/Slack/Discord.
I think - and this might be a bit controversial - the ThinkBook is better... because it is. The M1 is a great chip, awesome thermals (no fan!), but the laptop booted into Windows is faster.
Hey, maybe it's the memory, who knows! It doesn't swap, so I don't think it is.
You can read my parent post for my reasons. You can't quite run Windows or a stable Linux on a MacBook now, can you? Can't quite remove a 4GB stick and replace it with a 32GB stick, right?
M1 MacBooks are legit, the Pro is the best machine I have ever owned by a long shot (several X1's, T Series etc) the screens are beautiful and I can get on and do whatever I need without worrying about glitches. I run commodity cloud linux VM's on things I need to deploy/monitor, its FAR easier (imo) to write the software on my Mac and then move it out.