You have a point. They're not similar. OTOH, people do compare them. I think Apple realizes this and the Macbook Neo is a brilliant move.
It doesn't cost $1000 to get into the MacBook experience anymore, so drastically more people will be buying them for their kids and more families will have MacOS as their default.
It would be a brilliant move if it wasn't castrated with 8 GB, even my netbook from 2009 got upgraded to 16 GB during its lifetime, which ended in 2024.
A netbook from 2009, already had the capability to get RAM sticks up to 16 GB in total, go figure!
But 8 GB on a Mac is way different (in a positive way) from 16 GB on a different OS. On Windows 11, I can’t even imagine anything lower than 32 GB being a decent experience.
I got the lowest of the low MacBooks on a black friday deal years ago for my wife that only had 8GB, thinking the same way. "It'll be fine for her needs." It was more than fine. It was good. Got myself one a month later. I don't know why but RAM is different on macOS.
In the long run, I think we'll see more iPad-only families. The home computer is practically non-existent outside gaming niches or work-issued machines. We've had $700-800 Macbook Air models on sale for years now, same for the Mac Mini - little has changed. As cutesy as the shared computer ideal is, I see most people gravitating towards their phones and away from general purpose computing.
One reason I stopped buying a new iPad was because the hardware is great but the software prevents multiple users. Not all families can afford or would like to have one phone per person as well as one tablet per person. IMO, Apple is losing money by crippling the iPad.
I thought the tablet space is pretty much dead? I don't see many on the shelves at the local hardware store (which I walk by mostly of curiosity). It seems all laptops, with a sizeable share of foldable - and even these are way more present than tablets. So no, I think the tablet train has long left (exception being the standing workers in some areas).
You ask Gemini to make an Elsa and Anna Frozen-themed coloring book page. It says no, that would be copyright infringement. So you ask it to make something as close as possible but without infringing. It happily obliges.
The things he does is convince investors to give him billions of dollars to build what he wants. Where exactly does that leave us?