I have been using the M1 Max 14” for some CNN testing and calibrating and it is very good. For most tasks about 25% better than the Colab Pro P100 instance. I don’t know what the NVIDIA cards can do but it looks to me that you would have to spend quite a lot to get substantially better performance.
The tensorflow-metal plugin at 0.2.0 works quite well although I suspect that still want to clean up quite a bit more. Most packages that I have tried work quite well but some are harder to install (such as CatBoost). Using conda to install them has generally worked well for me.
If you are happy with the Apple ecosystem then I think you are likely to be happy with an M1 Max machine.