A student that uses google office won't care what CPU he or she has. But they will care about battery life. And that student will one day be in workforce, he will want to use a device that hes familiar with.
Indeed, I don't think anyone would argue that battery life is important, an all-day battery has been a want for a long time especially on laptops, surface devices, and others. That said, battery life for the majority of businesses will rarely sit above cost per unit.
We are not going to see people who had no interest in Apple yesterday, flooding over today because of battery life.
As I have said often, Apple and M1 are not going to cause any material shift in the rest of the market. Apple certainly has the opportunity to grow, it always has but they can't support the corporate market (wouldn't want Apple anyway) and there is a significant segment of gamers and those who simply wouldn't consider Apple so their growth has limits.
So it always comes back to intel/AMD and what their response is. ARM in the windows scene would be as much of a game-changer as it has been to Apple but I am sure we all know that is distant, very distant.
I suspect the next marker is still going to be Alder Lake, whilst many are comparing it to the M1 it's not really the case. Remember that intel does not have to compete with Apple as their chips will never be available outside of Apple devices, they are competing with AMD.
Not convinced Intel will pull off a strong enough chip to be fair, AMD may get their first in respect of maintaining strong performance and providing better battery life. Frankly, I don't care which one does it as long as one of them gets there fairly soon.