It's ridiculous to claim high and mighty that a chip that's not out yet is competitive. The only real way to test a laptop chip is in a laptop with the thermal choices made by the laptop maker. Hell, the M5 has been mostly benchmarked on the Macbook Pro, and that has a fan! The M5 is not going to be as impressive in the Air.

It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.