As someone using a "new Macbook" right now to reply to this message? The power usage is pretty irrelevant for most people. What matters is the end result. For this new Macbook, the 4.5 watt power draw simply means Apple was able to get rid of any cooling fans inside. Yes, a nice "plus" -- but not worth the downside of the performance trade-off.
(Battery life is still more than adequately good on a machine like a Macbook Air with a CPU using a lot more power.)
Determining what's "fast enough" for people is a big gray area. I sure won't declare this machine's performance "fast enough for 90% of the people I know who use computers"!
Truth is? A lot of things impact its performance negatively, and it's not always what you'd think of immediately. Have you tried using one of these with FileVault drive encryption enabled, for example? I did, and found I could really feel it dragging on the system. Boot up times were lengthy and disk performance just generally lagged.
It was definitely under-powered when I wanted to use VMWare Fusion to run a Windows 7 desktop on top of OS X. (I hit the thermal "warning" on multiple occasions while working in the Win 7 VM, where the whole machine had to throttle down to sluggish speeds to cool off enough to continue safely.)
Sure, it'll run Microsoft Outlook reasonably well, or your pick of popular web browser. But so would a lot of older hardware that's long since been out of production. This is a computer released in 2015! Word 2016 has some LONG pauses trying to open RTF documents made in previous versions of Word or other applications. I blame that mostly on poor coding in Word, but it's made more painful on this new Macbook.
Well sure, but 2011 MBP uses 45W of power! opposed to Core M 4.5W. even if your 2011 MBP was twice as "snappy" that still makes Core M 5x faster per power consumption
Core M is more than fast enough for 90%+ of the people I know who use computers.....
And I work in the Computer Science Field.