In the general case, it appears to be impossible to beat a hardware vendor that is also entirely in charge of the operating system and much of the software on top of that (e.g. safari).

In special cases, such as not caring about battery life, x86 can run circles around M1. If you allow the CPU rated for 400W to actually consume that amount of power, it's going to annihilate the one that sips down 35W. For many workloads it is absolutely worth it to pay for these diminishing returns.