It's the kind of thing that in a few years you'll be glad to have because some tasks will be offloaded from the GPU to the NPU, one I can think of is the background blur in video conferencing software or microphone noise suppression
That's still something that works more than good enough without the use of an NPU. We'll see if better use cases come out in future but I'd still prefer that power and die area go to raw CPU processing power.
You're likely already paying for silicon you don't use. Take AVX512 instructions (or other more exotic instructions) for example, or unused PCIe lanes, certain encoders on your GPU etc.
Also, people thinking they have no use for an NPU are almost certainly already using them, for example when taking a photo with their phone.
The closest thing is probably the 7840HS, 7940HS or the U variants (same thing at a lower TDP so slightly slower). The 8945HS, 8845HS, etc. are very similar but with a better NPU, which you won't want to pay for (and which still doesn't quite meet Copilot specs), so the 7xxx ones are better value. The performance of the AI 300 looks very similar to the 7940HS. Power efficiency may be better in the new one though.
Run Linux. Use KDE desktop for windows 7 like experience - I stopped using windows 7 years ago - as long as you don't trap yourself in garbage popular distro like Ubuntu or Debian - you'll be fine. Install Fedora with KDE, or Manjaro. After some learning curve (no disk mounting by default, wtf?) it does it's job pretty damn good, (unless you don't play games with anticheat ect.)
The performance looks surprisingly close to the older 7940HS. Both look good. Shame they didn't do a battery comparison between these two. The 7940HS doesn't meet the Copilot requirements in it's NPU, but I bet must people don't care about that.