So it's now possible to (fairly) straightforwardly run Windows 10 and 11 on an AS Mac using Parallels. Getting the ARM version of Windows isn't straightforward (Insider Preview) but not that difficult. I've read somewhere that Microsoft have promised to make ARM versions of Windows available directly, but they have not yet set a date. From what I've read, Windows performance is very good (because it's native and suffering only a very small hypervisor penalty). Running apps is another thing because they are emulated. The latest Insider Previews contain emulators for both 32 and 64 bit apps, with the 32 bit emulation being far more mature. How that works in practice, in terms of performance, is anyone's guess and will of course largely depend on the apps in question. It's claimed that there is a useful (30%) boost in performance for Windows on ARM running in a hypervisor on AS, but then when emulation is taken into account, that performance boost might well be lost. If it was about parity, then I suspect most people wanting to run Windows apps on AS would be happy with that.
With vmWare seemingly out of the picture at the moment, Parallels looks like the only trick in town and they have an ugly subscription model. Not a fan. However, it is a way forward, by the looks of things.
As others have said, a Windows 365 subscription might be better for some users, although I suspect an official Windows ARM licence plus a Parallels subscription would probably work out cheaper unless your Windows 365 workloads are very lightweight.
It's still early days yet. Windows on AS isn't yet mature, and vmWare are not fully behind it, but I'm sure they will be. Interesting times for those of us who absolutely must be able to run some Windows apps on a Mac, and even more interesting for those (like me) who absolutely must have that Windows instance right with them, on their laptop.