First off, let me say that I use Ubuntu 9.10 on my system at work. I am also running CentOS on servers, various Ubuntu on servers and a couple of Fedora systems. As you can see, I have experience with all of them.

So why is this review useless? Because they are testing development systems, which are not optimized, have loads of debugging flags set, and essentially are not ready for prime time. Of course it may be running slower!

IMHO, you should ignore benchmarks until the release candidates, at least. I generally ignore benchmarks on unreleased systems. I do, however, like to read and learn about new features which may be present in early releases.