Poor analogy, at least on the BMW 1 series front-- the 1 series borrows an engine from the M3 and defeats its own big brother (3 series) in 0-60 and in horsepower, in a lighter package. It's a serious sleeper of a car.
I don't get why that guy was complaining though. I mean, they both support the same thing. It's not like you were claiming the Macbook could do something it couldn't.
Well, how about an Xbench score of 171.76 at 2.4 gHz? This puts it up with the Mac Pro - a bit higher than Apple's quad-core, I think. It took about 3 hours to put the hardware together, but I could do it in an hour or less, now.
Wow. I just overclocked the cpu to 3.2 gHz and my Xbench scored jumped to 217. I just did a 2-pass Handbrake transcode for Apple TV (2500 bit rate H.264, AAC and AC3 audio) and it did a 1:55 movie in 55 minutes. Highest core temp was 66 C. It's now idling at 45 C. Remarkable. I should have built this computer a long time ago.