Indeed, this is a fairly lame benchmark. Java 6 update 10 is when they switched to the "consumer JRE" (also known as update "N"), which included a lot of changes to lower the footprint of the JRE, improve startup time, etc.

Another free game with good production values is Allegiance. It's a multiplayer space simulation with quite deep gameplay and focused on teamplay.

From Wikipedia:

Allegiance is an multiplayer online game providing a mix of real-time strategy and player piloted space combat gameplay. Initially developed by Microsoft Research, the game was later released under a shared source license in 2002 and is now maintained and developed by volunteers.

It's not really obtuse, both APIs are functionally equivalent. The biggest difference between both is that D3D is object-oriented whereas OGL is just a C-style series of function calls(ie. the difference is direct3DDevice->Present() vs glSwap()).

Also, D3D does not have an immediate mode, which is why OGL "seems" easier when looking at simple programs(immediate mode allows passing a single vertex by a call to glVertex). However, immediate mode does not reasonably scale, because the overhead of function calls quickly becomes the bottleneck with larger geometries and so you have to move into using vertex arrays(called vertex buffers, in D3D-speak), thus making your program very similar to the D3D one.

As for which one is better, that's debatable. In the 90's, D3D was lagging behind with regards to newer functionality(there was a Carmack rant on how D3D didn't include some functionality and the OGL folks simply did an extension) but I believe the situation is reversed now. D3D does have the advantage of having PIX for free, which is a really nifty 3D debugging app(GarageGames wrote an article about it).