I'm not talking about current benchmarks, but theoretical speed. As a language (not an implementation, set of libraries, etc.) Rust will allow for programs to run as fast as C or C++ in all situations.* Ada, Scala, Go and Haskell may be able to do better in isolated situations, but in general this is not true for them. A lot of the time, this doesn't matter, but it's very important when you want to be considered a serious competitor in the domain of systems languages.

* Pending some in-the-works reforms, and not including implementation-specific features like labels as values (https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-2.95.3/gcc_4.html#SEC64).

1) Even though the benchmarks game only shows a handful of tiny programs, Rust programs have only been contributed for half the tasks. (There are Dart programs for more of the tasks.)

Incidentally, some of those Rust programs are written for multicore:

    binary-trees Rust ≈ CPU Load 96% 86% 92% 92%
    fannkuch-redux Rust ≈ CPU Load 100% 100% 100% 100%
    regex-dna Rust ≈ CPU Load 59% 79% 80% 59%

2) Your "about equally fast" covers what others regard as enormous differences :)

Well, none of those are clear wins over any of the others. They're somewhere in between the hyperoptimized compiled languages and the interpreted ones, and very distinct from them.

Why wouldn't you expect Rust program performance to be distinct from interpreted program performance?

We haven't parallelized and optimized our implementations of those benchmarks yet. I wouldn't read too much into that.