The real question, however, is will anyone buy one if the NPU is as weak as believed? While it may not be much use right now, as fast as CPUs have become and the connectivity available, what's the real driver to buy one instead of waiting until a more powerful NPU is added?
NPUs are just useful to save energy, and, on a small amount, avoid the GPU getting used by random stuff at times, so it can be at 100% for where it is more needed. For desktop, a NPU is mostly just useful for developers, and since it is just debugging on dev machine, it doesn't need much performance, really.
NPUs matters a lot more when you get into the realm of 10W TDP or lower, but Intel is launching Lunar Lake for that segment, and Lunar Laker's NPU, while not really that powerful, is still rumored to perform similarly to Qualcomm's, Apple's an AMD's offers, and that is all it needs to do for now.
If you want to do serious lifting with language or math models ("AI"), you will need a consumer/workstation videocard or workstation AI card or SoC.