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Apple has since explained that M1s are slightly different between the Air, Pro and Mini, accounting for the different thermal chassis. (In the case of the Pro they enable an 8th GPU core.) It sounds like they are three different chips rather than the same chip in different configurations --I think he said that in marketing speak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lK0ySxQyrs

Apple makes it clearer that in the real world, these machines are only going to offer their incredible performance on Metal, iPad/iPhone apps and for any Mac apps that happen to have been ported over to M1 by their developers (using Xcode). These machines will only offer similar performance to existing Intel Macs when running existing Intel Mac apps because the incredible performance will be reserved for Apple's Rosetta2 software to make those unmodified apps compatible.

But what went unsaid, except during the part where they say they 'learned from their experience in the past processor transitions', is that by introducing the chip at the low-end of the lineup first, they create a market for the (few remaining relevant) Mac developers to invest in porting their code over to ARM and likewise, because these new machines run iPad apps at full speed on upto 6K displays, there is incentive for the iPad/iOS-only devs to expand the functionality beyond what their wares can do on a tablet/phone. (Any Mac dev that drags their feet porting may find that there are 50 iPad apps that now run fullscreen performing 75% of their functionality, costing them sales in the big volume accounts where they buy licenses by the thousands.) Meanwhile, the type of users who can get by with two USB ports, 16GB of RAM and a single external monitor probably don't run many third-party Mac apps and are going to have an awesome experience with the iPad apps and Apple's native apps.