but mongo often downplays it's lack of durability, which makes me wary of using it or recommending it because people don't know how to use it.

Not saying that MongoDB wouldn't be faster with full commits turn on, it is just that their design decision to pick that as the default and calling their product a 'database' seemed very strange at best, and dishonest at worst.

The only benchmarks we have ever done have been for internal testing comparisons between different versions.

The "Benchmarks" page on our site clarifies this policy: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Benchmarks

Previously there were several third party benchmarks on this page, which we recently took down to stand firmer on our benchmark policy. In the interest of full disclosure however, you may examine the page history to verify that we have always clarified these as unaffiliated third party sourced.

Apart from that, I actually found the comparison fair and accurate.