You are underestimating the value of the mobile heritage that Apple, Qualcomm and Mediatek have. They have technologies that allow the SoC to operate at sub-1W. These technologies are essential for smartphones, where battery life, and thereby the power efficiency of the chip, is crucial. It is these technologies that they are bringing to the their PC chips, that will enable extraordinary battery life.
Sure, Intel and AMD can also develop these technologies, but they do not have the mobile heritage that Apple/Qualcomm/Mediatek have. They do not have the experience and knowledge gained from developing smartphone SoCs for more than a decade. This is where the real value of the mobile heritage lies...
Lunar Lake is a step in this direction and a huge advancement, but I can say with certainty it's not enough to catch up to Apple/Qualcomm, and make up for Intel's lack of mobile heritage. It will take them several more generations to close the gap.
Battery life for laptops only matters to a point, and that point is "when you go to sleep" - and even there it is only relevant for extreme cases where people really are on their laptop every waking hour. So I'd argue that while the M1 battery life was impressive, especially when it was put up against Apple's Intel laptops (which Apple already cherry picked from Intel's most efficient SKUs) the battery life it provided it was overkill for most.
Sure there may be a handful of people who were demanding enough in their use and using it long enough in a day that they'd run down the battery and need to charge, but that's a niche market. I think its overblown as something that will create a big wave of people towards ARM PCs (even if you accept as fact that x86 can never be as efficient as ARM, which I don't)
The "mobile heritage" argument only worked so long as Intel/AMD designed a single core that had to scale from laptops to servers (modulo different amounts of L3 etc) Once you design a second core, all that's out the window, because they can target laptops specifically with the small core. And if Intel's claims are proven correct when people get their hands on their new "small" core, I think that will easily fall into Apple's "overkill" territory for battery life - especially if you consider Apple didn't exactly put the largest "legal" battery in the M1 Air. If they had the battery life would have been TWICE as long. Can you imagine the hand wringing from some if Apple sold the Macbook Air as a slightly larger/heavier model but with forty something hours of battery life? They didn't because they knew that was ridiculous, there's no target market for that aside from severe insomniacs.
So it doesn't matter if LL catches up with Apple/Qualcomm (and of course Apple is irrelevant as far as crazy wet dreams of ARM PCs being 50% of the Windows market) because it doesn't have to. It just needs to get from current x86 territory of "not enough battery life" to cross the Apple M1 line of "overkill". There's a lot of inertia to staying with x86, especially in the business world. Why would enterprise buyer choose ARM, given that the prices are not going to be any lower than x86? There's no upside for them choosing ARM, making this one of those "you'll never get fired for buying IBM" type of situations. Consumers may buy ARM, but they won't CHOOSE ARM. They'll just buy a PC at Walmart or off Amazon and not really realize what they're getting. Just like the average consumer doesn't know/care about the difference between Intel and AMD, they're just buying whatever Dell or HP is selling them.