In the Mac world, Apple store refurb does equal new. Same warranty, same ability to buy AppleCare, and flawless cosmetic condition. There is no equivalent with other manufacturers. Just shady refurbs from third party firms. Apple refurbished is a great way to save a bunch of money on the exact same system as long as you’re willing to wait.
The blade stealth is not equivalent because it’s 1080p, not a Retina display, and it’s a 16:9 display, so you have less screen real estate than a 13” MacBook Pro.
You need to pay $1899 to get a Razer blade stealth with a 4K display. At that price you can most definitely get the quad core 13” MacBook Pro.
I realize 1080p is better for gaming laptops but it’s not equivalent, that display is a cheaper part.
The blade stealth also comes with worse storage on board (even though its storage is cheaper).
I’m having trouble finding solid benches or information on it but Razer makes no file transfer speed claims and it’s not as high end of an SSD. 250MB/s is an order of magnitude slower than an APFS MacBook Pro, but some of that speed difference is due to APFS itself (see my other comments about Windows not being as good as alternatives).
An example of this is how the MacBook Air has an SSD installed that’s an order of magnitude faster than the Surface Laptop 2, so even though the Surface Laptop 2 has quad cores, it’s still gonna be slower for a lot of common consumer use cases due to the slow storage.
Your anecdotes aren’t relevant to actual user numbers, 70% of incoming freshmen in 2010 chose Macs according to a survey cited by Fortune. Macs are very likely to be even more popular now than they were in 2010. That was the year that Apple eclipsed Dell in college sales.