You could not be more wrong. Citing the Ubiquiti ER-lite 'Tolly' results just shows that you don't understand what they did to get their cited "performance".
Disclosure: We sell a ton of Ubiquiti. Hell, I nearly bought the company in its formative days, when Robert's original two partners quit to get "real jobs".
What did they do?
I work for a company that uses Cavium in almost all of our products. To accomplish the performance per watt on Intel or AMD would be 1) ridiculously expensive 2) still not scale to what we can do with Cavium. We do ~20Gb of DPI in Cavium today in a construct of roughly 24 processors on a dataplane.
Intel can't touch that - and I've seen a lot of attempts. I don't agree with Miercom / Tolly or, hell, even NSS - they're all paid for results. But the Cavium truly can do the offload and it does in a $99 device, some of what people have said around QoS and other aspects is true, it's writing your software to take advantage of that.
Not to be a detractor but your sentiment seems bitter - but I'd be interested in real perspective if you have one.
I also understand your perspective now - coming from Netgate. I'm sure I'd be kicking myself as well, but - then again Ubiquiti probably wouldn't be what they are today.