It hurts, but I'll pay a premium for worse hardware that will run Linux. But for others in my family Macbooks are just far better value by a wide margin than Windows laptops. Vertical integration really wins these days.
I have yet to read about someone who priced out something "as good" as the MacBook Air in terms of component quality and efficiency. What would the price premium be... over 50%?
Either way it costs money to avoid macOS at the higher end but not much when you’re spending thousands of US dollars.
Yup, I got Thinkpad X9, the idea being "Air 15 but with Windows". It does the job. I still think Air 15 is better (and cheaper), but the software compatibility and not needing to switch platforms outweighs that.
The remaining stuff... I'd say Lenovo has caught up for the most part.
Ideally passing through as much of the hardware as possible, and booting right into that config. Running it natively is ideal, but projects like Asahi are forced to play catch up porting another OS to new devices.