It does not seem right. Recent Ubuntu releases will not perform better on older machines than Windows 7, and I seriously doubt that there's a pact between Canonical and Intel as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
"Work expands so as to fill the time [or other resources] available for its completion."
There is a story, probably apocryphal at this point, that a long time ago in what seems like a different universe, an engineer working on the Xerox Star system, was looking into why it was bogging down. It was reported there were nearly 800 subroutine calls between a key stroke and a letter was rendered on the screen. They managed to cut that number in half and the performance improved by a third. Mostly it was abstractions,
People always find uses for every available CPU cycle, as predicted, now we're entering a time when you will need to optimize something to get more cycles.