>the benchmark is pretty much irrelevant, because if it was we would all be coding in C or Fortran

The point being debated is that the JVM is being developed and advanced more rapidly than the CLR. Performance is one way to demonstrate this. Performance does matter in many cases, and most folks aren't prepared to write their web services in Fortran.

>is doing quite great against java 7 (commercial implementation, unless I misread)

I would hardly classify 7x slower as "quite great"

>It would be interesting to see how the openJDK is performing ? (the real question would be : is openJDK crippled compared to the Oracle - JDK ?)

OpenJDK runs HotSpot, so no major difference