Ehh, not really. I've used both Macs (old 15" rMBP, 12" Macbook, M1 Macbook Air) and Thinkpads (T450s, X1C G7, T14 AMD) and Lenovo just frequently drops the ball on things like display, speakers, touchpad and battery life.
Apple has also made some poor decisions in various areas in the past like poor thermals, power-sucking dGPUs, and of course the butterfly keyboard. The M1 Macbook is very nearly perfect though, and I don't know how any of the PC vendors are going to top it.
Microsoft and Lenovo both offer full-metal laptops with good rigidity and build quality. The Surface Book is weird but feels great in-hand. Trackpad is quite good, but, the whole thing is a giant gimmick. Lenovo X1 line has an all-metal option. I haven’t handled the 2019 version but previous iterations were quite nice - in a totally un-Apple-like way.
Unfortunately, there’s no retailer out there that I trust to actually display these high-end laptops so you can go actually get a feel for them. The Microsoft Stores was the best bet, but those are all closing. I shopped for an all-metal laptop 2 years ago after leaving Airbnb and was wholly disappointed with this $600-$1400 lineup at BestBuy. I ended up getting a Huawei Matebook Pro X (sic) from the Microsoft Store in San Francisco. I put Linux on it, but were I to do it again I’d just spend 2x more on an actual MacBook.
I also looked at the Matebook... and came to the same conclusion, and just bought an M1. The Matebook felt like it was trying to be a MacBook without being a MacBook (down to the marketing page for it).
That said, to me the existence of the Matebook _proves_ that what I'm after should be possible, and it just comes down to nobody actually doing it.
I looked through ThinkPads in order to find standard recommended laptop selections for a previous job, and it was really striking (a) how many slightly different fiddly model selections there were with tiny differences that should have been an options picker rather than different product entries, and (b) how many of them still had 1080p-only screens in the year 2020. Like, come on, seriously?
I just bought a T495s with Ryzen. It's a 14" 1080p. For my desktop PC, I use a 27" 4K monitor. I can tell you I love the 4K and would never go back. For the laptop though, the 1080p resolution is perfectly fine, plus it saves a lot of battery life compared to 4K.
I'm just past the point in my life where I want to itemize this stuff. Take my money and give me the best package possible. I've got better things to do with my time.
The entire buying experience also feels very sales-like - which, yes, it's absolutely a sales process - but the buying experience with Apple is leagues better and feels more human. This isn't even hardware, but website UI/UX... why on earth is it like this in 2020? This is much easier to solve than hardware chain issues.
I don't want to say that if you are wondering about the trackpad on a Thinkpad you are doing it wrong, but the big benefit of a thinkpad is the knob. I would prefer buying a thinkpad that didn't have a trackpad at all, at least on an ultra book - my first one back in 03 didn't have a Trackpad but I found that I rarely used the external mouse I had attached to it.
