> The paging works wonderfully well; an advantage of everything being fused.

I think it's more of a combination of 1) lower baseline usage by macOS and 2) your swap is guaranteed to be on a fast SSD (1.5+ GB/s read/write).

Also when you buy a budget PC they cut back on everything, while you get roughly the same SoC across the board for Mac (give or take a few cores). There are absolutely horrid CPUs, GPUs, and SSDs still being released today! If you cut your budget too much you can get a slow E-core only CPU with a no name SSD that's barely faster than a HDD.

Hopefully the MacBook Neo puts pressure on manufacturers to do better.