Since I talked about some Photoshop benchmarks the other day I think it's only fair to talk about some real benchmarks that apply to the machines themselves rather than that specific software. Geekpatrol posted their benchmarks yesterday, and TUAW picked up on it. Rather than rewrite their findings, or redo their math, I'll just do some fancy quoting.

Fabienne at TUAW wrote
I took it upon myself to average their twenty benchmark results. Using Geek Patrol's benchmarking results, the MacBook Pro they used is 3.74 times faster than the PowerBook they tested. If I throw out the low results they received from Stdlib Allocate (which they note: "depends more on library performance than raw hardware performance"), the MacBook Pro is on average, 4.26 times faster than a PowerBook.

You'd be right to say, "but those are just benchmarks," but such high numbers make it very clear that the new MacBook Pro will be faster when running a native application. It doesn't mean all applications will suddenly be faster than any other machine ever anywhere, but it does mean a huge performance boost for Apple's laptops.