In terms of evaluating the hardware, there's a another flaw in that methodology. NVidia probably doesn't have to disable all optimizations to improve IQ substantially. They give users the option, but since very few customers use it, they don't bother finding which settings are most important.
This is probably true. Nvidia never did a good job of explaining what these settings did. Or how they impacted performance. Some of the G7x/Nv4x opts were very aggressive. ((Anistropic Mip Filter optimisation being one of them)) which were texture stage optimisations. This single optimisation ((while beneficial to performance)) was also the largest culprit for image issues the games that we saw. Trilinear opts along with the LoD optimisations they had in place were not nearly as satanic. Unfortunately very few people actually looked at these opts to see exactly what they were doing and just chose to hit the HQ button. An effective but perhaps often overkill aproach to an architecture that had some of its shader performance tied into its texturing abilities.
Chris