The custom Ryzen silicon in the Surface Laptop 3 is based on 12nm not 7nm, the latter is heck alot of more efficient than 12nm. Plus it loses out further in power savings due to the lack of LPDDR4X as it's that version of LPDDR4 consumes less power than LPDDR4. The intel version has LPDDR4X, as well as WiFi 6 using a more recent chip therefore it's more efficient for what it does. Comparatively, the Ryzen version runs a 4 year old qualcomm WiFi chip... with no Wifi 6 but WiFi 5.
So when you put it all together it's sadly a subpar experience than the Intel version.
Sure you can undervolt the Ryzen custom chip and get more battery out of it that way but for a premium laptop you shouldn't have to resort to undervolting.
Having used both 12nm and 7nm Ryzen CPUs, I can say this much AMD knocked it out of the park as my 2700x is hitting 4340 Boost clocks at 1.331 volts, heck I can even run it at 1.292 volts and still hit 4295 Mhz single core boosts.
However, there are teething issues with Ryzen 3rd gen which have largely been resolved but there are some lingering issues which are primarily down to the motherboard manufacturers. As with the R5 3600 I had difficulty get the ram upto 3600 Mhz (on the bios update - F5b) but on the stock bios it was pretty much a breeze but the the CPU would never boost past the advertised Core Boost.
As both the r7 2700X and r5 3600 being the same price (at one point the 2700x was £178 on Amazon) as well as bills to pay I kept the 2700x as it's alot better suited to my usage.
Overall AMD needs time for the silicon in laptops to mature and once 7nm hits laptops Intel will have alot more competition on their hands and they know it hence the price cuts as well reconfiguration of their entire product stack to enable hyper threading on lower end CPUs.
Competition is always good for the consumer.
Going back to your question, if you can wait I would suggest wait for Gen 2 for the Surface Laptop 3 running Ryzen if it has to be a Ryzen chip and you are able to wait.
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