There might be something wrong with your MBA (or maybe you are very sensitive to certain small changes). The MBA doesn't need much thermal headroom to burst to it's maximal performance (5 watts compared to Tiger Lake 20-25 watts). The only place where it should exhibit throttling is GPU-heavy work or heavy-duty multithreading, and even than the measured throttling is 10-20% (which is still faster than most x86 CPUs on full speed).
As do I. I've been using the M1 MBP and an Intel i9 16" side by side - the M1 wins for almost everything I do, unless it's an embarrassingly parallel task.
Which config are you talking about exactly? I am looking at Lenovo USA website for 16GB, 1TB, HiDPI display machines and I see the following:
X1 Titanium Yoga ($2,469.35)
X1 Carbon Gen 8 — old model with Comet Lake ($1,931.40)
X1 Nano 13" with a decent CPU ($2,207.40)