A reviewer cannot in good faith separate M1 silicon from its end-user product experience, because it is not a standalone product. M1 is not available off the shelf. It is only available in a couple of small laptops and the Mac Mini.
It's easy to rewrite that sentence to make that separation clear, and he doesn't. Gruber goes into detail about the author's history of being wrong and misleading in the past regarding Apple's processors, so in that context I think it's fair to take that part of the review in bad faith.
Morehead isn't asking us to take his word for it. He used the device for a few days and shared his review as a counterpoint explicitly intended to balance against the pro-M1 hype. I thought it was a pretty nice assessment because Morehead focused on product usability instead of raw benchmarks, and I used his review as part of the process of informing my recent decision to buy an Intel MBP13 rather than an M1 model.
It seems obvious that Morehead's opinion seven years ago about 64bit being unnecessary in mobile was incorrect, mainly because today's mainstream phones ship with more RAM than 32bit would support, but that doesn't mean every word Morehead types is now ritually unclean. He was wrong about something; it hurts his credibility but doesn't banish him from the conversation.
Besides, unless we think Morehead doctored his screenshots, it's pretty hard to argue that his review is nonfactual in its entirety.
More specifically to your point, I don't see why there has to be a separation between hardware quality and software experience when the user (A) can't buy the hardware without paying for the OS too, and (B) can't use the hardware without using the OS too.
If you just bought a new Intel MBP then you got a horrible deal by comparison. I also didn't say the review was nonfactual, just that it contains within it an inaccurate framing and conflation of M1 as a processor and the overall product. It's worth noting though that many others' experiences with it, and Rosetta 2 specifically, were quite different than Moorhead's, so unless you're using the specific set of software Moorhead mentioned in his review, it's very possible you would have been better served by an M1, even today.
