You call 23.8% faster "not even close" ? 10% faster is barely noticeable. 24% is a modest improvement, IMO, but nothing to write home about. Let me know when it's 2x faster. The availability of a quad-core on an Apple notebook is worth something, but it's not enough and the prices are too high, especially on the 13" "MBP" (what's pro about integrated Intel graphics?).
Other than the CPU improvement and "Thunderbolt" (currently useless/worthless since there are no devices to use with it), I see slow GPUs, slow hard drives, no ram improvements, no Blu-Ray support and no USB3.
Sorry, but my 3TB drive does not support Thunderbolt, but DOES support USB3 and this computer has a USB2 port on it. Why not make that a USB3 port instead? It's freaking stupid to carry a USB2 port when it could be a USB3 port regardless of whether Thunderbolt is present. Obviously, they chose not to include USB3 ports on the Thunderbolt bus as previously theorized on here.
As for mini-display port...NO ONE uses it but Apple and they offer exactly one lousy monitor. WTF is the point? Then they combine that with the Thunderbolt bus so your display is overlapped with devices that routinely may get plugged/unplugged. Apple's monitors won't pass-through Thunderbolt so you'd have to plug the connector into the device (e.g. a hard drive) that does pass it through. Can you imagine having to disconnect your monitor every time you plug/unplug a hard drive? What a royal PITA, all because Apple couldn't be bothered to give Thunderbolt its own connector or use the USB3 style connector? (shakes head at the stupidity of it all)
Apple could at least provide TWO Thunderbolt connectors so that one could be used as a dedicated display port without having to worry about moving the connection while daisy-chaining other devices (and/or to use two external monitors when docked without having to share/daisy-chain cables (which a monitor wouldn't likely support so you'd need a break-out box to create two ports).
Meanwhile, "Lion" won't have OpenGL 4.x (only 3.2) so forget about getting any kind of parity with Windows games on that end (4.x has support to match the latest DirectX features to improve things in that area) even with the same hardware. So Apple is behind again. Apple should be leading on all fronts. They're more worried about their phone line, it seems. (and leading first with Thunderbolt won't help much since there's no device support out there yet).
