Yes but my point is that even if that is true then unless the CPU is the bottleneck (which not even the people arguing against my points have tried to claim) *and* it remains the bottleneck when you double its performance (ie you don't just move the bottleneck to somewhere else) then you won't see a doubling of performance of the MBA just by doubling the power of the cpu.
In actual fact the bottlenecks in modern machines are pretty much anywhere *except* the cpu.
As a machine, even if the guesses being thrown around are true, you won't see anything like a doubling of performance. I wouldn't be surprised if the difference is barely noticeable.
I don't see what the bottleneck would be then? I actually just want to know, it seems counter intuitive to me. On my 2.0 GHz C2D macbook, the bottleneck seems to be the CPU. Usually the CPU goes to 100% and I have plenty of ram left and the HDD isn't too busy either.
On the MBA, the bottleneck surely doesn't come from the HDD (other than if you spend your time moving huge files around). Unless you're playing games, it probably isn't the graphics card. Then this leaves the RAM, or the front side bus frequency. On the 11", the FSB is at 800MHz, 1066MHz for the 13". I guess that could be it, but considering the 11"'s CPU is running at 1.4GHz, it doesn't seem too bad.
My idea of the MBA is it's a snappy computer that chokes up as soon as you throw anything processor intensive at it. I guess for the average user, the "performance" they perceive has to do with how fast apps open, how many apps you can have open with the computer running okay. Obviously this has to do with the HDD, and for many users, WiFi speed probably has a lot to do with the perceived performance of a computer. But as soon as you start using something processor intensive like Photoshop, Logic, HandBrake (okay maybe not handbrake on a MBA), once the program is loaded it's the CPU that's going to give before anything.
I guess the perceived performance depends on what you do with your computer. In my case, I know the CPU is the bottleneck.