i still prefer my 2011 v2 parts!
as well as the i5/i7 8th gen which has much longer battery life compared to this mobile xeon part.... i mean it's nice to have all that power but really the most important thing for me and probably for most people is the battery life and weight..... if you can't use it for a transcontinental flight then it's just not that useful most of the time.....
By "i5/i7 8th gen" I assume that you actually mean U processors, i.e. 15 W processors.
In that case you are of course right, but the comparison is meaningless.
Whoever is willing to spend money on a laptop referred as a "mobile workstation", for example myself, has to use it for tasks where a 15 W processor is too slow, so it is not a valid choice.
"i5/i7 8th gen" is ambiguous, because it can also refer to H processors, i.e. 45 W processors, which have either the same battery life or worse than the mobile Xeon processors. The battery life can frequently be a little longer for mobile Xeons than for i5/i7 H processors, because the Xeons are normally selected from the best processor chips, which usually have a slightly better power efficiency than the average chips which end in i5/i7 models.
My laptop (a Dell Precision from 2016) has a mobile Xeon and the battery life is certainly not worse than that of any 45 W i5/i7 that I have seen. I have also experimented with U processors. While those are perfectly OK for document viewing & editing, for Internet browsing, movie viewing etc., they are annoyingly slow for any serious work, e.g. for program compiling or for the use of CAD applications.
The conclusion is that it does not make sense to compare the weight or the battery life of the reviewed laptop with those of computers with U processors. They are intended for users with completely different needs, which require different balances between multi-threaded speed and weight/battery life.