I’m not vouching for the validity of any of this. However, Microsoft has come up with some information regarding the expected performance of both systems. Unsurprisingly, it’s tilted in Microsoft’s favor.

Sure, at the end of the day games and services will win the race. But, great graphical performance sure helps. Especially when certain developers (ahem, Valve) won’t develop games (ahem, Half Life 2) for your system (ahem, PS2).

Power is important.

Here’s Major Nelson’s posting of Microsoft’s take:

Part 1 of 4: Overall Performance numbers
Part 2 of 4: CPU Performance
Part 3 of 4: GPU Performance
Part 4 of 4: Bandwidth Performance