It doesn't matter. All this tells you is that there is no reason to pick any of the current flagship smartphones over another because of their speed.

That's kind of a big deal, given how small the iPhone is and given its above average battery life. Both those things might only be possible because of an underpowered CPU/GPU – but they are apparently not.

It's quite impressive that Apple apparently didn't have to make any really obvious trade offs, it hits all the high notes across the board (even if it isn't necessarily number one in any one category).

Off the top of my head, it might be relevant to face recognition, or the new real-time (?) panorama stitching, or image processing in scanning apps, or advanced paint apps (properly-smearing finger paint?), or HTML5 apps (say, Google Maps), or Garage Band, guitar amp simulators etc ...

Mostly it's stuff that people only do rarely. But the big exception is the browser -- render time is still something we worry about in desktop browsers, so I bet it'll still mean something for mobile browsers for a while.

Gaming and video rendering are another couple that could use more CPU.

It does for the times where the OS is poorly optimised or slows down to a normally crippling pace.