Thank you, sir. And BTW, I used to be one of the “performance” geeks who was frequently measuring DAW performance. I’m intimately aware of how DAWs and audio interfaces perform, and how the current crop of excellent DAW benchmarks originated. We owe a lot to folks like TAFKAT and the great work he’s done with DAWbench, etc…
The point where I stopped worrying about performance so much was with my 6-core Windows machine. I finely tuned the machine to beautifully stable, low-latency perfection, and it never let me down. Cubase just worked wonderfully on it, and I even overclocked it to get that extra mileage out of it. But I found the overclocking was unnecessary, and I reverted to stock speed.
Problem was, I could never max out the machine in a REAL WORLD session. That’s the key. It handled everything I threw at it for real, paying jobs, and did everything I asked of it. Now, I do know of folks who could definitely max that machine out due to their massive orchestral templates, but even when I was working on larger sessions, I would just use VE Pro and slave a couple of other computers when needed. Which is what most of the big orchestral template guys do anyway as well.
But for MY sessions, this 6-core had essentially caught up with and surpassed what I needed to ask of it. Another good friend of mine recently built an even newer 4-core Haswell machine, overclocked it, and it performed basically just as well as my 6-core at stock speed! I was so impressed and quite thrilled to see that extraordinary performance for him. It dawned on me that we’ve essentially caught up to where we dreamed we would be a few years ago. Sure, there are times when VE Pro slaves are still going to be needed (even for me and the types of projects I do). But nowadays, we’ve reached whole new levels of incredible performance with the current generation of computers, where the old Windows performance advantage no longer holds real weight for the vast majority of DAW users.
Granted, there are always going to be plugin developers that will push the edge, and I’ll be the first to line up for U-he’s next synth plugin, for example. But even multiple instances of U-he’s Diva, which can suck up a lot of CPU, can run just fine on today’s machines, on Mac and Windows, no problem. So now it’s really a catch up game… only this time, it’s not the hardware that needs to catch up, it’s the software developers that now have all sorts of new power awaiting their algorithmic genius. Yes, the pendulum will swing the other way again, and we’ll all need to upgrade hardware… but the landscape has materially changed in the past couple of years, where a typical computer has mind-boggling power that it can do quite a few impressive things with audio at low latency.
And when they start writing plugins that can really take advantage of all these cores, massive RAM and SSDs we now have, I’ll be ready to upgrade. Until then, Mac or Windows machines are really no longer competing for the low-latency crown anymore. As far as I’m concerned, Windows can keep the crown and run with it. What matters most now are other issues, that revolve around user experience, personal preference, workflow preference, hardware preference, studio/client preference and interoperability, etc… Win vs. Mac performance is now irrelevant to me. Both work fine for just about anything you can throw at them. Other things matter more.
And I should add, that realization ultimately lead me to experiment more and more with Macs – I’ve had them on and off for a long time for client purposes – but after running some tests on Macs with Pro Tools and Cubase, and picking up a retina Macbook Pro, I decided to take the plunge and switch for my main DAW… there were many reasons, not the least of which was a building pressure from clients, etc…, but overall, I’m really pleased with the switch, and so far I definitely prefer OSX to Windows… we’ll see how it goes in the months ahead! 
Finally, having said all that, what matters most is really what works best for individuals and their workflows. Whatever works best to help you do the work you want to do is what you should stick with.