That might be your opinion, but it isn't out of line with their competitors. You don't have to look particularly hard to find other premium thin-and-lights at 8GB and a ~$999 price tag. I think that is ridiculous, because the Air is better than all of them.

fwiw the memory bandwidth is so high on these devices that it doesn't feel as bad as it should be.

On the Surface Pro 9, it is $300 to upgrade from 8 to 16GB. To go to 32GB, they require you to choose a higher tier processor which brings the normal retail price to $2599, but it currently has a $500 discount, so the total is $2099.

Okay, let's look at them.

I'll pick the second to the top tier models, since that's what the Air is for Apple:

Dell Latitude 5440 - i5-1345U, 8 GB DDR4, 256 GB PCIe NVMe - $1,099.00

https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/latitude-5440-l...

ThinkPad X13 Gen 4 - i5-1335U, 8 GB LPDDR5, 256 GB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe, $959.40 after coupon

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/configurator/cto/index.html?bun...

Prices for premium laptops... are premium, and the strip-down models start with modest specs.