I mean yes and no. If you value energy efficiency there's nothing comparable. There are sturdy laptops, there a more powerful laptops, but to my knowledge there are no laptops that offer the same combination of battery runtime and performance.

Nope. I've spent similar amounts of money in the past on a great Lenovo gaming laptop. It was phenomenal for the first two years. But then after the first major Windows update, it seemed like the drivers became less reliable and issues started popping up here and there. Another year so later and everything started to bog down. Reformatting it fixed it for a little bit, but the same issues came up again eventually.

I've heard good things about the surface, so maybe if you go the direct from Microsoft route it could be better? I'm just burnt out though. I don't see myself buying another Microsoft product again.