Performance is a little lower, but tbh... even my old Pixel 5 was fast enough. Marginal differences in performance don't seem that important to me now in a phone. Battery life might be lower, but I get the feeling that real world performance is really close.
According to users of both, real life battery life of the Pixel 8 is much lower than the benchmarks would suggest, because of the inferior SoC and modem which drains the battery much faster then the Qualcomm powered S23, when you use your phone a lot on data.
The problem is most battery benchmarks are pretty meaningless as they're always done indoor on WiFi which is a lot easier on the battery than when using the modem for data, so they don't reflect the real world use when you're out and about throughout the day roaming between cell towers of varying signal strength.
My biggest torture scenario for a phone's battery is web browsing on the train or in our office building. It literally nukes the battery compared to wifi.
Maybe some of that is the difference between the P8 and P8Pro. I'd guess high modem usage isn't as big of an impact on the higher battery P8Pro.
In what way?
I'm someone who hasn't bought a new phone since 2016, and there are zero occurrences in daily use where I feel it's too slow. I can't imagine being one or two generations behind the bleeding edge in CPU speed to be a hindrance. What are people doing on their phones that need ultimate speed?
Only thing bothering me now is its screen size, but not enough to replace it. Unfortunately Apple wants me to throw a functioning device into a landfill to make more money, so they cut off software updates.
But in practice, performance is mostly being wasted on phones right now.