The 4 comparisons of smartphones are in reality 2 GPU benchmarks, and 2 browser benchmarks, one of which is just sunspider, and the other seems heavily weighted towards sunspider since the devices come in roughly the same order. And yes, I knew before I saw this benchmark that the GPU was going to be better than the competition. So as I said, better GPU and newer Javascript seems to cover it (particularly when you note the jump of older iDevices due to OS upgrades i.e. newer Javascript).

As I said, there's no straight CPU benchmark, or anything that is limited by RAM so ""beats all smartphones" in benchmarks" is a fair bit less accurate and complete than what I said.

There's also the fact that Hacker News generally frowns upon editorialized headlines. What was so wrong with the original title of "iPhone 4S Preliminary Benchmarks: ~800MHz A5, Slightly Slower GPU than iPad 2, Still Very Fast" that it needed changed?

(edit: getting very pernickity now but since you misunderstood my comment about comparing the sunspider benchmarks: Android's javascript loses on the sunspider benchmark to iOS's if run on the same device. So if a 1GHz Android device (without NEON) matches a 800MHz iOS device then it's quite likely that a 1.2GHz phone chip will beat it by a fair margin in Sunspider with the Honeycomb or ICS V8, by more again on other Javascript benchmarks which it generally does better on, and more yet again on anything that just benchmarks raw CPU power. I keep reading about Apple's magical A4 and A5, so I'm being pedantic on this point, but the gain is that they chose to use a better GPU from PowerVR and updated their javascript VM, not pixie dust or other Apple magic used in their hardware).