There are some legitimate questions being raised here about what the truly full performance picture of M1 will be once multiple sets of really comprehensive sets of measurements are done. However, there's also a good deal of lazy FUD in the thread too. It's early days, but already many reviews have been posted online and so far only one Intel app apparently won't download and run on an M1 Mac: Pixelmator Pro. And that's from one review so it's not yet certain if it's an individual glitch or if that app really won't run on any M1 Mac.
Beyond that, of course apps that have not yet been updated won't run optimized on the M1 - which affects both speed and power/battery usage. But even before they get updated, there've already been both benchmarks and real-world timed tests showing that the new M1 machines - including the MacBook Air with no fan and only 7 GPU cores - perform as well or better running translated Intel apps than existing low and mid-range Intel Macs do. And the M1 machines do this while offering 30-100% longer battery life.
Yes of course, GPU-intensive tasks in Intel-only apps running through Rosetta translation on an M1 Mac are not going to be as fast as those same tasks running on a higher-end Intel Mac with dedicated graphics. But remember, Apple put the M1 in their lowest-end Macs - it's not intended or claimed to beat the graphics performance of higher-end machines with dedicated GPUs. The jury on that won't be in until Apple releases the M1 Plus or M1X or M2 or M1 with outboard GPU support or whatever that they have planned for their midrange and higher-end machines.
Given the multiple benchmarks and timed tests on both optimized apps and Intel-only apps, conducted by multiple reviewers, who have posted the exact benchmark numbers and test timings, we can already say that the M1 setup kicks the crap out of the equivalent Intel Mac models and the Intel Mac models one and two steps up in the model line.