Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
A similar thing happened with Pixar/Disney, where post acquisition Disney Animation Studios started to work a lot more like Pixar. Interestingly, Steve Jobs was also CEO and majority shareholder at Pixar up until that acquisition.
They 100% have been selling ARM windows machines for years now, they just suck in comparison to x86
They did push for universal binaries, but no devs wanted to make the switch, I actually appreciate that Windows didn't bork all prior applications unilaterally like Apple does with most of their OS releases (I work for a company that has a program with Linux/windows/macOS and I swear every single major macOS update breaks shit and Apple doesn't give a fuck)
I don't see the performance being comparable yet, at least in my experience the power of ARM is much more in its energy efficiency, it simply does not compete in actual real world power (at least yet)
Ultimately I think it comes down more to Apple vs Windows approaches, Apple controls every aspect of every official device running macOS, windows is much more free form with so many manufacturers and different configurations being possible.
I would never willingly purchase an Apple device for that reason, but I also like Linux, just too much of a gamer to constantly want to worry about comparability.