But there’s no indication from benchmarks that it would have much better performance then the MacBook Pro. Indeed, it would be expected to perform less well on some common tasks - and it has half the battery life. I can’t even find a benchmark comparing that particular laptop to a MacBook Pro. Did you find one somewhere?

There're benchmarks comparing M1 with Zen 2 mobile CPUs such as Ryzen 7 4800U. Based on the results I saw, on average, AMD delivers similar single-threaded performance, and way better multithreaded performance.

Ryzen 7 4800U is very similar to Ryzen 7 Pro 5850U: same core and threads count, same frequency, same 10-25W TDP. The main difference of the new one is Zen 3 microarchitecture instead of Zen 2, and there're quite a few sources comparing Zen 3 to Zen 2.

If you want to be certain, wait for the direct benchmarks.