Isn't Qualcomm kind of the same distance behind with the most recent hardware? I don't get the impression that the gap is widening, with the new high perf ARM cores it seems to be shrinking, even.

The M1 represents Apple’s best effort running on the world’s most advanced manufacturing process.

It’s a pretty safe bet that up until now the Qualcomm team hasn’t been given the freedom or the resources to make their best effort on a general-purpose desktop-class chip. Now that Apple has shown what is possible, you might think that the gloves are coming off. Especially if Microsoft and/or Samsung* indicate that they would buy such a chip at the price it would have to be sold at.

* Microsoft and Samsung currently sell ARM-based laptops, with the Microsoft version being a slight modification of the Qualcomm chip in the Samsung.