Gentoo will always be faster and a better system, we all know it, Michael knows it, its written in the stars... BUT, Michael loves Ubuntu, so i doubt he'll make a big effort to post anything that says "oh this is way better than mr.Ubu", and honestly i dont see that as a bad thing.
like the phrase goes "truth is in the eye of the beholder".
Gentoo is my favorite distro, but I understand why Michael needs something standardized to work with - like a distro that has a default filesystem and WM/DE.
Maybe if somebody made Gentoo: Atom Netbook Optimized Edition with an installer, then he could benchmark it.