Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.

I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.