It's also not hard to find a Windows laptop that beats the M5 on battery life. Single-thread performance is the only remaining measure where the M5 is king.
This shows the Neo winning on benchmarks, except for file transfer speed.
The Dell laptop wins on file transfer speed and got 14 hours of battery time versus the Neo's 13 hours.
I don't understand how you read that article and concluded that the Neo got beat on "every conceivable measure"
This is admittedly the measure that most correlates with perceived responsiveness and quality of user experience
Can you count how many (out of 9) measurements the windows laptop beat the Neo in that article?