But those benchmarks show that it does keep up until you literally throw more cores at the benchmark.

Without going up to 10 cores, only 4 models on that list are faster than a Mac mini that costs $600, and those models are negligibly faster. And they can’t run on a battery for 15 hours like the M1 laptops.

So it’s really just a nitpick surrounding the fact that Apple doesn’t sell an M1 with more than 8 cores yet, which Apple definitely will, probably within the next 6 months.

That's not a nitpick, it's a legitimate issue with the chip. 8 cores is not consistent with the state of the art, it's consistent with low tier consumer CPUs.

The other major issue is lack of memory (just by way of example, I allocate 16GB of memory on my local machine for VMs regularly - I can't buy an M1 Mac to do my work right now).

And a Mac Mini only costs $600 if you're ok with 256GB of disk space (not enough) and 8 GB of memory (not enough) and no EGPU support yet (not sufficient). It's a cool toy right now.

The M1 is a low tier consumer CPU, and the design choices are consistent with that positioning. In all likelihood this is the slowest M-series processor Apple will ever make. That it is competitive with some high-end processors is compelling, but what this might mean for the future is exciting to many.