Looking at the product photos it looks like they black-bar the entire top of the display when anything is full-screen? So that seems to make the notch even more intrusive as you lose out on all the screen real-estate next to it when something is fullscreen.
Or rather, the menu bar is now a permanent bezel that nothing else can occupy?
The bezel wouldn't have been as big. The resulting "fake bezel" is larger than necessary to house the camera, as it needs to shift where the camera is relative to the physical dimensions of the display and the border that it needs.
Just see literally any other laptop that has both a fairly small bezel and fits a webcam in it, like the Dell XPS 13. The camera in the macbook may be better and require a larger lens assembly as a result, but it's surely not as big as the bezel + notch itself requires.
As someone who always hides the menu bar, though, having a notch is going to kill being able to switch tabs in Chrome, search in Outlook, or broadly, use any controls at the top of a window in maximized mode. I’m guessing the hidden menu bar is going away on this machine because it would break usability of all other apps.
