The battery life is the best of any laptop I have ever used by far.
And the performance for number crunching is as high as any x86 machine I had previously and per watt it blows everything out of the water. And it is dead silent while doing so, whereas every x86 'work' powered laptop I ever used would wind up sounding like a jet engine with my workloads.
So for someone who runs linux.. if they want to run it on hardware that is this nice (to me at least)... this is it. This is worth it. It's worth developing for.
Also, Apple is going to stick with the M-series SOC's for a long time now that they have switched. And they tend to keep hardware interfaces for a long time too. So the development of Asahi now will bear fruit for... at least the next decade I'd say.
I still use OSX for daily activities, but the kernel Asahi is developing may be my plan to stretch this 2021 M1 MBP 14 out hopefully to the year 2030, as MacOS moves on. My 2013 intel i7 Macbook Pro made it to 2021... 8 years of daily use and world travel. I was beyond the moon with that product performance and I'm expecting similar from these new macbooks based on my current 1.5 years of use.