I'll have a Mac any day an employer offers to buy it for me. Lovely hardware, but it's just too glued-down for my current budget and growing frustration with lack of repairability.
I shall take a good lesson from your case and keep my ThinkPad in its Pelican case whenever I'm not using it. Can't afford to be laptopless for months!
The battery live is the Macs killer feature. Not sure if it would be ass good with Asahi. I'm not using MacOS.
The Apple build quality is good, but I honestly do not like to handle to cold slippy smooth aluminum body.