Making an iteration so much better is not something I'd ascribe to luck.
What, exactly, did M1 change about anything about using a laptop? Longer battery life? Faster? Okay, same improvements as had been featured for the last 20 years. And it wasn't any thinner, depending on the model line it was substantially thicker even.
So what exactly was new about M1 that wasn't just a bog standard iteration we'd seen dozens of times by that point?
Even just considering Apple's product line surely you'd have to rank things like Intel's Core 2 as more significant, as it enabled the creation of the MacBook Air and was Apple's return to subcompact laptops. Or Intel's thunderbolt which radically changed the entire I/O story and capabilities for Apple, who fully embraced it.
It’s the first time I owned a laptop that lacked compromises. It was consistently snappy and fast at every task from a full to empty battery. And it did so without burning my lap or producing an incredibly annoying fan noise.
As for loud fan and burning laps, though, do also keep in mind that Apple was particularly bad in the 2016 generation, which is why the M1 laptops got thicker.
For instance, the unified CPU and GPU memory, which allows to run ML models on a Mac as if you have a large dedicated GPU. (Unified memory of course harks back to the 8-bit era; the key was to make it performant.)
Was already common and widespread with iGPUs in CPUs on x86, and was standard on all ARM mobile SoCs for a solid decade.
AMD in particular had already done a bunch here with their APUs including OpenCL support in 2012 and fully coherent shared address spaces with 2014's Kaveri
Security is also much improved over the Intel laptops for various obscure and technical reasons.
