At the end of the day, ranking products based on their performance is a slippery slope - it's too dependent on the individual user's tastes, associated equipment, and too many other inconsistent factors. That's why I created my SSP chart back in 2002 - it can't compare sound quality or other factors because those factors cannot be tabulated fairly, but it can compare simple features.
As much as a piece of my ego might enjoy the notion that my 990 does X% of what a product (Meridian, Lexicon, or whatever) costing an order of magnitude more, the reality is that in general Sanjay is right. (I say "in general" because there will be a few cases such as mktheater's when someone actually does compare units at this wide a price range.) We can try to assign values, but in the end it's a pretty fruitless exercise because the values will be different for each person.