Just to say that the Qualcomm Snapdragon isn't a Cortex-A8 core - Qualcomm licensed the instruction set from ARM and then designed their own CPU architecture that (mostly) implemented the ARMv7 instruction set. Since Snapdragon is not a Cortex-A8 and a completely custom design Qualcomm were able to implement changes that allowed for higher speed/faster clocks and/or improved performance (ie. better SIMD operations).

TI and Samsung licensed the Cortex A-8 architecture from ARM and proceeded to build their SoCs around it, tweaking the ARM design where necessary to suit their requirements, but it's fundamentally a Cortex-A8 at heart.

I do agree though that the ridiculous "megahertz claims" are leading us back into the dark ages of Intel vs. AMD.