The average user isn't the only one who doesn't have the slightest idea of what hardware he really needs to get the job done. If "us geeks" also knew better then any synthetic benchmark would be automatically dismissed as being irrelevant and useless, and the most important property of a computing rig would be its cost/performance ratio, with cost reflecting not only the hardware price, direct and indirect, but also operational cost. After all, it's irrelevant if a certain game runs at 100fps or 10000fps, and for regular use stuff, such as web browsing, office stuff and whatnot, any 6 year old system is overkill.
Yet, geeks salivate with stuff such as cores, MHz, a string of irrelevant benchmark numbers and even statistics on HPC usage, and this for systems which the closest they come to HPC is calculating the n-th digit of pi.
So, cluelessness isn't exclusive of non-geeks. The e-penis factor is always influencing purchasing decisions. The only difference is that some are more knowledgeable about useless numbers and factoids than others.