You're welcome to hold out hope as long as you'd like, people have said that stuff since 2019. Qualcomm seems to be nose-to-grindstone right now, Nvidia's SPARK offerings ended up being more niche than expected and Microsoft is happy to go full steam ahead on x86. The status quo on PC isn't really changed with Apple Silicon, and now that the work-from-home market has died down it's not entirely clear if computing as a whole is going to respond. Add tariffs into the equation and it doesn't seem likely that ARM will be getting any new license applicants anytime soon. Nvidia might make a cheeky laptop chip just to put their GPU in a form-factor that can frustrate Apple, but the ARM market continues to stay frozen.
I'm content with my dopey $150 Thinkpad and Linux. MacOS is untenable and headed down the dark monetization path that ruined Windows a long time ago. With my Macbook I have to constantly live in fear that Apple might break my package manager, disable third-party stores, remove virtualization or depreciate 32-bit programs.
> it doesn't seem likely that ARM will be getting any new license applicants anytime soon
Softbank's post-IPO business model for Arm is to move away from bespoke royalty-based licensing, standardize SoCs via a preferred partner like Mediatek, and demand a percentage of the sale price/value of final product.
Despite the lackadaisical Qualcomm Windows-on-Arm PC launch, Qualcomm has a huge pipeline in mobile and automotive, which should motivate support for Linux and virtualization with their gunyah hypervisor. Linux on Apple Silicon Macs can offer a point of reference for both macOS and non-Apple Arm PCs.
Post-apocalyptic Thinkpads are awesome resilience devices, engineering existence proofs, and inspiration for future US-manufactured computing devices.