Not really in a laptop though—and certainly not with the same efficiency (battery life, fan noise, weight). If you want a laptop, the MacBooks are pretty indisputably king these days.
If a desktop is fine then yes you can build some great Windows rigs for much less money.
Actually it seems at this time you're more or less right. In the past there was quite a spread between a beefy thinkpad and a mac. Looks like rightnow you can get comparable thinkpad vs MBP14 (with various specs) within $200 of eachother, which means you're really choosing between nuanced and highly personal preference differences. (such as appearance, OS, keyboard feel etc).
Beyond those superficial differences you mention though, the MacBook Pro is probably lighter than the beefy ThinkPad you’re imagining. It’s undoubtedly quieter—you’ll rarely hear the MacBook’s fans even under heavy load. The screen of the MacBook is high refresh rate and likely higher quality than the ThinkPad. The MacBook speakers are astoundingly best in class. And the MacBook likely gets better battery life to boot.
And here’s another kicker—all those “comparable” Wintel laptops viciously throttle their performance the second you unplug them from the wall. Not the MacBooks. They keep being just as performant on battery as they do plugged in, while still delivering that excellent battery life. It’s remarkable.
I really can’t in good conscience recommend anything but a MacBook to a prospective laptop buyer right now, unless the user requires specific software that only runs on Windows. Save a couple hundred bucks only to end up with a vastly inferior machine? It just doesn’t make sense.
