Not quite true. I'd probably be a bit faster door-to-door from where I live in Massachusetts to Manhattan Midtown. But that's, to my way of thinking, an awful drive. I think that's generally the case for a lot of the Northeast corridor routes that many people take. Train doesn't take much longer and they're not remotely pleasant drives.

What higher speed rail could do in the Northeast is make the New England to the Pennsylvania/DC routes more attractive which don't really work for most cases today. But that's sort of a marginal and it doesn't address the more interesting cases where the economics and travel time math don't really work vs. air (e.g. NYC to Chicago).