Recent Surface ARM laptops do not seem to be locked in any way.

What does locking down the device have to do with the CPU architecture?

I recently spent an equivalent of MacBook Air M4 price + import tax to get a linux laptop called Starlabs Horizon that advertises up to 14 hours of battery life. Maybe in a TTY it could do that, but in practice, I haven't yet seen any x86 laptops from any company, linux or not, to match even 50% of a macbook's battery. Realistically it's 4-5 hours like the rest of them. Not to mention that for that money I got a cpu that is a power equivalent of pre-M1 chip mac. Also they put speaker grills at the bottom (what were they thinking??)

For laptops, what I had in mind is excellent power management and efficiency, it seems to correlate with ARM but I think most people don’t really care for the details of architecture.