A $600 - $700 Dell laptop's CPU does not come anywhere close to an M4 Macbook Air, which you can get right now at Best Buy in a 15" version for $999.
The Mac will also have a faster SSD and (not sure about this) a faster memory bus architecture. And a better GPU and better ability to use Thunderbolt docks / have 3 external 4K displays.
CPU is almost never a limiting factor for workers. RAM is since they generally need a keep a bunch of browser tabs open to memory hogging things like Outlook/Teams/JIRA but RAM speed they probably won't notice.
If they have 3 external 4k displays, their company will probably shell out for Macbook.
The thing is, the storage on Apple devices is so unbelievably fast, you can get by on 8GB just fine. Even with clogging up hundreds of Chrome tabs. Swap is barely noticeable.
Memory management on Windows devices in contrast is utterly painful. The RAM itself is already slower simply due to physics (can't beat the SoC proximity with anything socketed), storage I/O usually has to cross through a lot of chips (same thing, Apple attaches storage directly to the SoC), and then the storage itself that you find on cheap devices is actually SATA under the hood or bottom of the barrel NVMe, no competition at all to Apple. Oh and the storage and RAM are both adequately cooled on Apple devices, so Apple can drive them much much harder unlike the Windows world where often enough the only thing that gets cooled is the CPU and GPU.
Yes, I do think Apple wants far too much money for RAM and SSD storage upgrades, but it's undeniable that even the more expensive ends pack a lot of punch.
That's getting affordable but still does not beat 600-700 decent Dell machines you can get.