According to nVidia slides, GF100 is 59% faster than HD5870 in the tested scene.
According to several reviews, HD5970 is 53-61% faster than HD5870 in Heaven benchmark. Despite the test and scene were chosen by nVidia, Fermi doesn't perform faster than HD5970. Fermi is presented as a tessellation monster, but in most intensive tessellation benchmark it doesn't perform better than HD5970.
I think this pretty corresponds to Dave's words - nVidia spended a lot of research and silicon for a feature, which has quite low impact on real-world performance... Reminds me R5xx and its dynamic branching...
5970 has more transistors than GF100: 4,200 millions vs. 3,100 milliones. So, i guess the 5970 has a lot of useless transistors, too?