I guess I've always looked at weight & battery life first, trackpad / keyboard & general build quality second, and then actual specs/performance third. As far as I can tell, Macbooks have always been the best choice for that. Especially once retina displays came out. And even now with the crazy performance of M1 Macbooks, that's gonna be hard to beat.
You may have already bit too hard into the ecosystem when you use Apple marketing terms like "retina display" instead of hiDPI.
There are more than one better laptop across all of those metrics as a whole.
One thing Apple does do significantly differently is moving along tech (for better or worse) because the other OEMs can be timid in their experimentation until a generation after a big switch in Apple hardware.
I bought an ASUS Zenbook last year and I can thank Apple for setting trends for hiDPI, DCI-P3 displays, Thunderbolt, and big trackpads. But on the flipside, I can lament Apple for bad trends and it not having a 1/8" headphone jack and soldered RAM. And because it wasn't Apple I have a touchscreen+stylus and saved a lot of money.
The newest trend of using ARM (and RISC) processors in laptops (could care less about what Apple brands it as) is a good one though. There have been attempts at good ARM chips, like Samsung's flagship ultrabook, but too many applications didn't run on it to make it feasible. I had an old Chromebook I slapped Linux on and it was a mess because certain applications, namely anything leveraging Electron or just having a .deb file, wouldn't run. For better or worse, people have to cater to Apple making such switches. Now you have started to see projects actually release binaries outside of x86.
weight, battery life, retina display (or 4.5K/5K display), great trackpad, snappy