For a company that hates on Apple as much as it does it is incredible how much they're trying to emulate.
I'm not sure that MS *do* hate on Apple that much. Most of the recent Apple-bashing has been coming from Intel.
Many Apple users are Microsoft customers as well... and they've even co-operated in the past (Internet Explorer was the default web browser on Mac OS for a long while, MS Word has been supported on MacOS since forever...).
They really didn't have to do things like supporting MS Edge or VS Code on Mac, either.
Apple's existence also helps them defend against monopoly allegations...
Anyway, MS have been copying Apple (or, at least, copying what Apple learned from Xerox) since Windows 2 (Windows 1, not so much).
As for the virtualisation: the status of Win 10/11 for ARM on M1 via Parallels seems to be "works for me" which doesn't necessarily mean that it works well enough for Microsoft to put their name to it. For one thing - I believe that W10 still had some ARM32 binaries which couldn't work on M1 - are these gone from W11?
What *probably* needs to happen now is for Parallels and/or VMWare to negotiate a licensing deal with MS to bundle W11 for ARM with their products - (I can't believe that I'm the only genius to have thought of that, so presumably either they've tried and failed, or it's in the pipeline, or they've done the math and it isn't economic) - but that would also likely require them to take the front line for support (just like anybody else buying an OEM license).
The problem is: back in 2006 the new Intel Macs were, basically, generic PCs that were only an EFI firmware module and a bit of installer-fu away from being able to run a bog standard Windows XP disc. Once the firmware update was done, Bootcamp was pretty much just a "wizard" to help you partition the disc, patch the Windows installer slightly and download the correct drivers. About the only proprietary driver was for MBP trackpads... That pretty much held until the T2 Macs started rolling out.
The Apple Silicon Macs, however,
aren't just standard PCs with an ARM instruction set instead of Intel (that's a big issue, but not the only issue) - I don't think there is yet a single, well established "standard ARM PC architecture" to match the standard great-grandson-of-IBM PC de-facto standard, and if there is, the ASi Macs certainly aren't
it. So it's doubtful if there will ever be a one-size-fits-all Windows-on-ARM shrink-wrapped retail box, and an Apple Silicon version will need new boot-loaders and drivers for almost
everything - including, crucially, Apple's proprietary GPUs - to run bare-metal on an ASi Mac... and Apple have explicitly said that they *won't* support that, which probably means that they won't even guarantee to keep the "bare metal" specs that drivers rely on stable (why should they? it's extra work and any new Apple machine will come with a new version of MacOS/iOS with updated drivers).
So it's going to be virtualisation - which avoids that problem since the hypervisor can just translate calls to Windows drivers to stable MacOS system calls - but then the hypervisor writer is going to have to take point for support.
