I'd rather see a side-by-side comparison of the two phones loading a web page. That would give you more accurate real world comparison. Peak speeds are moot imo, spikes in speed don't really tell the whole story.
This is exactly what I'm planning on doing when my ViPhone comes later this week. I'll have both versions side by side on 3G and will do a bunch of comparisons. After several days of testing, I'll be returning one and keeping one!
You're right though... you don't see the whole story just by looking at speed tests. Latency comes into play, as well as consistency. My guess is that the viPhone may actually start loading things more quickly, but will fall behind during larger downloads (like video streaming). For web browsing, audio streaming, and bite-sized network grabs, I'm betting they will be pretty equal (or maybe even the ViPhone doing better). It also depends on location. If you get 3+ mbps on AT&T at full signal, that's great. But if Verizon's works consistently in more areas, then that could also be a major consideration.
I can't wait to do some testing!