I found the answer, thanks to u/Gryxx1 on the Linux Questions subreddit (yeah, I’m not linking to reddit’s “new” interface, deal with it reddit). It’s a weird work around, but after MUCH tinkering, it worked for me.
Here’s what I did.
1. Booting from a totally different computer, install Qubes onto an external hard drive of the same size as the NVMe drive (1 TB in my case) . Stop the install after the first reboot and go on to step 2.
2. Boot the problem laptop using the external drive. I had to use the boot menu to boot from an EFI file to get it to boot this drive, but boot it did.
3. From this drive, do the rest of the install / configuration. For me, this meant letting it sit all night with a blacked out screen and no keyboard or mouse input. I don’t know what Qubes is doing, but it takes hours and hours and your drivers are disabled for some of it for some reason. More than twice I made the mistake of getting impatient, thinking it had hung and rebooting. This corrupts the drive and go back to step 1. If I hadn’t read people on the internet saying “let it sit all night,” I would have assumed this strategy just wouldn’t work and the system was hanging.
4. Once this is done, you can do configurations and troubleshooting if you want, but I don’t recommend it because Qubes runs like a snail when you’re using an external drive as your hard drive. So just use a live USB to boot the laptop into something else (I used Mint 20, because it comes with GParted out of the box) and then use dd to clone the external drive to the NVME drive. Given I’m using dd to clone a terabyte block device to another terabyte block device, this ALSO takes all night. . . and now if I have to start over it sets me back two days! Yippy! (I had to do this once already when I broke sys-net trying to install wifi drivers, now I seem to have broken sys-net again, trying to install wifi drivers FML)
So there you have it folks, a stupid workaround that gets you functioning Qubes on your Intel PoS NVMe drive (this is happening on a brand new HP laptop, amirite?)
Now that I’ve gotten you here, to the point where it’s installed and working, you can spend more days / weeks troubleshooting your driver issues that come up trying to run Qubes on a brand new made in China high end consumer laptop. But it’s about the journey not the destination, right?
Speaking of - an additional quirk: I STILL have to use the boot menu to boot from an EFI file to get it to see the NVMe drive as a boot device (otherwise the BIOS just complains about there being no operating system). As an extra plus, the BIOS doesn’t give you any drives to select to look for the EFI file on unless there’s a bootable USB plugged in lol. This could probably be fixed, but I just consider it an “extra security feature.”