I think it all but caught up lately in VP8 vs h.264 performance. Google kept improving VP8 performance. However, webm has also added VP9 support recently, which is clearly superior.
[1]: http://blog.seancassidy.me/h264-and-vp8-compared.html
[2]: http://iphome.hhi.de/marpe/download/Performance_HEVC_VP9_X26...
Not so superior...