They have good performance, especially per watt, for a laptop.

Certainly not ahead of the curve when considering server hardware.

Not just that; they have a decent GPU and the unified memory architecture which allows to directly run many ML models locally with good performance.

Server hardware is not very portable. Reserving a c7i.large is about $0.14/hour, this would equal the cost of an MBP M3 64GB in about two years.

Apple have made a killer development machine, I say this as a person who does not like Apple and macOS.

Apple still has quite atrocious performance per $. So it economically makes sense for a top end developer or designer, but perhaps not the entire workforce let alone the non-professional users, students etc.