Re:It's right there in your post (Score 2, Informative)

Shoehorning his adjectives doesn't change the facts: .NET is damn fast. Perhaps not "I need to raytrace downtown Manhattan." fast, but certainly fast for web services, desktop applications, mobile apps, and Windows PowerShell. Heck, it even beat out a C++ app where low-level usually succeeds--lifting big data structures--until Raymond Chen wrote his own allocator.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ricom/archive/2005/05/19/420 158.aspx