Quite...
Come on people... you're making all of us look stupid.
Yes, out of the box Gentoo will be a tiny bit faster than Redhat or Mandrake or Suse or whatever, because you tweaked your CFLAGS and set the right arch. Is the performance difference noticeable? Is it really? I'd like to see some benchmarks on how much faster Gentoo is than Fedora or whatever, because frankly I think the performance difference is negligible.
And once you get beyond the "out of the box" stage any distro can be as fast as any other. You can rebuild RPMs in Fedora for your arch. You can compile everything from source with your CFLAGS and settings in Debian. You can even - believe it or not - choose exactly what services you want running if you fiddle about a bit.
The strengths of Gentoo are Portage and the use flags system. That said, even portage has its caveats and there are other things like apt-get which are pretty damn brilliant; and I'm sure you could find a way to do the same thing that use flags do in other distros when compiling from source just by setting the right options in your configure command.
I've got to the point where I don't use Gentoo because it's "so much faster" or some rubbish. I use it because, for me, it's easy. I know my way around and I know how to use it, same as other people know their way around Redhat or Debian or whatever.
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