Drivers anyone? ^

At release, the GTX 280 was benched to be slower than the 9800 GX2. The 4800's, while faster than the 38xx's by a lot, were oft compared to the 9800GTX's... Well, add on a 4870 1GB edition, driver improvements... and voila, performance is where we think of it today.

Lost in a lot of the shuffle is the fact that AMD/ATI has had these cards out for DX11 devs since June...

We all know what happened last time we went to DX10. Nvidia had its cards out far earlier, and devs worked much more closely with Nvidia...

Obviously, a lot remains to be seen, but it wouldn't surprise me if DX11 titles, early on at least, have a slight ATI slant