Apple's new iPhone 4S apparently runs at "only" 800MHz yet benchmarks well against the best Android devices clocking in at twice that speed. Without knowing exactly how Apple tweaked the A5 chip, I wouldn't be surprised if they've got a better cache. They've certainly spent a lot of effort on the GPU.

Of course, what really matters in the mobile universe is power consumption. If Apple could ship enough load from the CPU to the GPU to enable them to run the CPU slower, that probably enabled them to use a smaller battery.

For contrast, Android 2.x and earlier did all their UI rendering on the main CPU. This was apparently entirely rewritten in OpenGL as part of Android 3.x, which will presumably be trickling down to phones in Android 4.x. Consequently, while it will still be comparing Apples and oranges, at least they'll both be following the same general approach to splitting CPU/GPU computation, leading to more even comparisons.