I think there is a lot of confusion with what I was trying to say. I wasn't claiming MBPs are "bad"...just refuting the claim that similarly spec'd laptops are about the same price. And I still believe that is a reasonable point.
Regarding the drives, I found some links quoting those figures [1]...although synthetic benchmarks in the wild seem to give different results (~2.0 GBs read and 1.3 GBps write)[2][3]. I wonder what a synthetic benchmark with those two laptops would be like side to side. It may very well be the benchmark tool in both videos is artificially limiting drive performance...which would also be reflected on the Blade who knows.
(As an aside, even at 2.0 GBps read and 1.3 GBps write that is still very fast)
[1] http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/11/01/early-benchmarks-o...
I totally agree and in my opinion this makes the laptops not really comparable. Battery life can also lead to higher cost (e.g. display with lower energy consumption). But I would also qualify the performance statement a bit. If you neither play games nor use Cuda, a graphic card is unimportant. If the applications you use are not or hardly parallel, a dual core might even perform better.
BTW: I checked again and the Samsung SSD has read speeds of 2.150 GBps and write speeds of 1.550 GBps, while the Apple one has read speeds of 3.1 GBps and 2.1 GBps write speed.