They are preventing everyone from running Windows on their hardware. Virtualization is not the answer. All they need to do is support Windows on ARM in bootcamp mode with decent drivers and this bit of criticism goes poof!
I know this is an old post, but you've kept returning to this idea, and it's just nonsense.
Some core low level peripherals such as interrupt controllers need to have their drivers baked into the kernel - they can't be loadable modules. On Arm platforms, Windows assumes these are the de facto standard options common to most open-market Arm SoCs. Additionally, WoA is designed to be booted by UEFI firmware.
This hardware and firmware doesn't exist on Apple Silicon. Some of that's because Apple began designing Arm SoCs before any de facto or de jure Arm platform standards got rolling. Some of it's about Apple's requirements - UEFI isn't secure enough for their tastes, so they wanted to get away from it when they left x86 behind.
Apple can't change the Windows kernel or boot infrastructure. So, even if Microsoft wants to make Apple write most of the drivers (fair enough), there's no point in Apple doing so until Microsoft has poured the foundation. Apple has indicated they're open to working with Microsoft to get this done, Microsoft doesn't seem interested.
Do you forget that it was an Apple engineer who in his spare time, got MacOS working on x86 hardware, Steve Jobs saw it, flew to Japan to meet with Sony top dog and pitched an idea of MacOS running on Sony VAIO laptops?
The story you're referencing omits so much background that it can be misleading.
By the time Apple was reverse-acquired by NeXT, their OS (which was going to become Mac OS X) had already been ported to five different hardware platforms in total. Notably, one of these was the x86 PC.
Some "Rhapsody" (Apple's codename for OS X) developer prereleases still supported x86 PCs, and Jobs occasionally hinted in public that he'd gleefully abandon PowerPC if he didn't get what he wanted out of IBM and Motorola. By the time they released OS X in 2001, that kind of rhetoric had died down and they'd removed x86 support.
However, Apple also open sourced part of OS X as "Darwin". Darwin included most of the OS below the graphical user interface layer. They periodically shipped Darwin binary distributions corresponding to Mac OS X releases, and these distros continued to be dual-architecture PPC + x86.
That's how a single engineer was able to port OS X to x86: much of the work was already done and actively maintained by others. The rest was mostly already done, but not maintained.
If Apple isn't promoting the fact that their bootloader is unlocked, there's no guarantee that it will stay unlocked. Maybe they are curious to see how far hackers get with running a functional Linux on their hardware. If they get too close for comfort, there is nothing stopping Apple from locking everything down coz we all know how much Apple fears competition and they do literally everything under the sun to prevent anyone from getting in on their side of the fence.
You often let the mask slip and make it clear you're trolling. "we all know how much Apple fears competition"? Give me a break.
No, Apple doesn't run marketing campaigns to inform the general public that their bootloader is unlocked. Why would they?
That doesn't mean they haven't discussed it at all. They've framed it as a feature for security researchers and other developers who need to boot and test modified macOS kernels. This is possible as Apple still releases kernel source. In turn, since Apple isn't about to hand anyone else their private signing keys, they offer a way for end users to downgrade boot security for specific OS containers, making it possible to install and boot unsigned kernels.
These unsigned kernels don't have to be compiled from Darwin/XNU source code, of course. They can be anything. Apple knew this, and knew that it would lead to a Linux port (and more).
In practice, Apple has gone the opposite direction of obstruction. IIRC, it was about a year into the Apple Silicon Mac era when they added a bootloader feature which was utterly useless for themselves, but made life significantly easier for everyone working on booting non-Apple binary formats like Linux ELF.