Is Google Chrome's V8 engine really that good?

I have compared Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 and Google Chrome 0.2.149.27 on SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark with the following results:

• Firefox - total: 2900.0ms +/- 1.8%
• Chrome - total: 1549.2ms +/- 1.7%

and on V8 Benchmark Suite with the following results (higher score is better):

• Firefox - score: 212
• Chrome - score: 1842

and on Web Browser Javascript Benchmark with the following results:

• Firefox - total duration: 362 ms
• Chrome - total duration: 349 ms

Machine: Windows XP SP2, Intel Core2 DUO T7500 @ 2.2 Ghz, 2 GB RAM

All blog posts and articles that I've read so far also claim that V8 is clearly the fastest JavaScript engine out there. See for example - V8, TraceMonkey, SquirrelFish, IE8 BenchMarks

"... Needless to say, Chrome’s V8 blows away all the current builds of the next-generation of JavaScript VMs. Just to be clear, WebKit and FireFox engines haven’t even hit beta, but it looks like the performance bar has just been set to an astronomical height by the V8 Team."

Perhaps a bit anecdotal but comparing runs between Firefox and Chrome showed a significant difference in benchmarks.

http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html

Try for yourself.

While in Microsoft:

Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft's latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. According to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations

Slashdot

I imagine how @rjrapson came with that conclusion. Every blog post I see, calims it's faster.