I'm only claiming that they could survive a transition to native ARM apps, not that emulation would be a long term solution.

I guess Apple could 'survive' releasing a new generation of laptops which run slower than the previous ones to facilitate a user-invisible component sourcing decision, but it seems like a bad move.

It'd be temporary and only for third-party apps, not Apple-supplied ones. But yes, I do agree that it's not worth it for them--this is part of what I mean by high fixed costs of switching.