There is nothing on the market at any price that provides both of the performance on battery and battery life the MacBook Air has, let alone higher tiers. Apple Silicon is sincerely insanely impressive.
Apple has also always been perfectly fine performance per dollar in the class they've actually been in. Their build quality isn't perfect, but it blows everything meaningfully cheaper out of the water. You can't compare an aluminum shell with trashy plastic and be surprised the plastic is cheaper. The actually well built stuff like thinkpads were never meaningfully different pricing than Apple. That's what it costs.