XP vs Vista: what's faster on top-end hardware?

Today I missed an interesting topic , in the comments to which there were allegations that Vista is running faster than XP on top configurations.
A couple of months ago I asked myself the same question - is it faster? An experiment was conducted, XP was compared with the latest updates at that time, and Vista with SP1 just released.
The configuration on which it all worked: Gygabyte P35-DS3P / Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 @ 3000 / 4Gb DDR2 800 / 2xST3500630AS / GF 8600GT. Drivers at the time of testing were also the latest.
The test was published in my LiveJournal, it happened that it was divided into three and a half parts:
Part one: tests of single- and multi-threaded applications.
Part Two: Copy Speed.
Part three: synthetic benchmark, the impact of Aero on performance.
Part three and a half. Work with flash-drive.
The results were unexpected, if not to say - slightly shocking. Their reality, if possible, is illustrated.
In short - in computing applications, Vista performed worse. Somewhere - within the limits of measurement error, somewhere - at a quite tangible percentage. But working with data in Vista was faster, and faster so much that I was rather surprised by it. Apparently, Vista uses memory more efficiently ... however, it's interesting to get acquainted with other opinions.