Basically, you have to remember how slow and power-hungry Mac laptops before the M1-based laptops were. They were not using the latest available technology, and the M1 switched to using the latest available technology. So for Mac laptop users, it's a giant leap. For everyone else, not as amazing a leap, but still a very good chip.
The M1 still has a clear lead in single-core performance and that at a much lower clock speed than the competition. That is the big leap in performance. There are still far to many things which depend on single core performance. This is why a Threadripper with 64 cores really shines only for very compute-intensive parallel work loads. It will be very interesting, how the performance of Apple Silicon will be, once they go to 8 or 16 high performance cores.
Basically, you have to remember how slow and power-hungry Mac laptops before the M1-based laptops were. They were not using the latest available technology, and the M1 switched to using the latest available technology. So for Mac laptop users, it's a giant leap. For everyone else, not as amazing a leap, but still a very good chip.