I know what ARM is. Can this be used for anything other than phones and tablets/notebooks? Otherwise it's of no use to me as I use laptops and desktops for computing and phones for making calls.
For anything. Maybe you did not understand. These notebooks can be used like "normal" computers. They even ran World of Tanks on a demonstration device.
The performance of the notebooks is not yet clear as the emulation costs performance. However, the Snapdragon 835 has a special hardware-support for an emulation. That means the emulation of the x86 system is outsourced to a special new part of the CPU and should not affect its actual performance when running x86 programs including Windows. There are not yet official benchmarks for the Snapdragon 835 but for its predecessor:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 MSM8996 SoC
That means you have a decent performance and a very good energy efficiency. As another benefit, a Snapdragon is a System on a Chip (SoC) and includes also a GPU, a 2,3,4G modem, W-Lan, Bluetooth and more. Additionally, if you have a SSD installed the notebook will never make an operating noise due to passive cooling.