In my opinion this is a step towards the Apple cloud hosting.
They have Xcode cloud.
The $4B contract with Amazon ends, and it’s highly profitable.
Build a container, deploy on Apple, perhaps with access to their CPU’s
It's quite a stretch to go from Apple launching container support for macOS to "they are going to compete with AWS". Especially considering Apple's own server workloads and data storage are mostly on GCP.
It's still virtualization, so it'll necessarily be (slightly) slower than just running Linux natively. I don't think Apple's hardware makes up for that, certainly not at the price point at which they sell it.