jdiamond

Intel is partly fabless.  Their high end chips are fabricated at TSMC, and their lower end chips are fabbed using their classic technology.  Intel's hope was that by 2025 to be able to make their own chips again.  We'll see how that timeline plays out.

FWIW, I found the best performance using Azul's Java 17 ARM64 JDK with ManyMC.  It's truly amazing - peak is about 100x faster in everything - imagine selecting a Minecraft world and being able to start playing in less than 4 seconds! . Minecraft and Java really seems to have the single greatest speedup going native of all applications.  For me, #2 was Blender, which was about 12x faster.

Your mileage obviously may vary.  I have a 16" Macbook Pro with the 10 CPUs and 32 GPU cores.  Running straight x86 Java Minecraft through Rosetta is honestly barely playable - sometimes you can get 20 fps, but you get frequent slowdowns.  It's a lot like trying to play Minecraft on my 2015 MBP.  Then I used MultiMC with (and this is important) an ARM version of Java that is NOT the one that comes bundled with MacOS.  I was shocked to immediately get 500-700 frames per second, just like YouTubers got!  But I found this was a peak case - it can drop as low as 60FPS.  But mind you, this is at high resolution and a render/simulation distance of the full 32 chunks.  (It you use the java that's bundled with Macs, you only get about 45 fps.)

I've been doing a lot of comparisons with M1 native versions vs Intel, and Minecraft hit the #1 spot, often running a solid 100x faster in the best case, and about 5x faster in the worse case.  I will be overjoyed if the new Minecraft Java for M1 will be this good.  All they ever had to do was switch out which JVM they bundled Minecraft with, but I'm not surprised they kept this really low key - they don't want people noticing how much faster Java with M1 is versus Bedrock on Wintel.
 

Buy a 16" Macbook Pro with an 8TB hard drive.  Tear the screen off with your bare hands.  Done.

For me, all the pain already happened with the move to Catalina. I already lost all the software that isn't already being actively developed, which for me was most of it. (And this wasn't old software either - dang that 2006 decision to have one Mac made with a 32-bit x86.). And actively developed software shouldn't have much difficulties hitting the ARM button on XCode. So AFAIK, Catalina is already forcing 99% of the transition. And I'm sure Apple is thinking they can plug software gaps with iOS apps. FWIW, x86 emulators on ARM do exist. So if Apple wanted to give us a Rosetta, they could. And once the Unix stack gets boot strapped, all the other Linux stuff should hopefully just compile. Hopefully the kinds of small utilities that are so valuable already exist for ARM chips and should appear quickly on Macs. Here's hoping Apple leverages this to go all out - like a Macbook Pro with 256 ARM Cores and 256 Megabytes L3 cache running at 15 watts.