I think the idea behind real-world software performance is that "if you need it, you really need to have it, but most of the time you don't need it." The benchmarks game isn't all that unrealistic for this. Most of the time, you won't care about performance at all. When you do care about performance, you'll be able to devote an experienced engineer to carefully optimize a specific hot spot, not unlike a microbenchmark. It matters how fast you can get the code to go when it's a hot spot, not how fast all your little support code runs.

My one complaint is that there's no benchmark that measures FFI performance. Realistically, if you build a system in Python or Ruby - you're going to be dropping down to C for your hot spots. And so scripting language performance on all these compute-intensive tasks is somewhat irrelevant, you really want to know how much overhead you'll incur crossing the scripting/C boundary (which, in my experience can sometimes be large enough that it wipes out all the gains of coding in C in the first place).