Those are the max. speeds. In power-saving mode, I highly doubt the iPad runs at 1Ghz for anything.
What's the point of having a 1 GHz processor if you never run it at that speed?
It could be that for short bursts (which usually come immediately after user interaction), they use the full clock speed, but for long running computations, they throttle down.
It's a very common process to reduce heat and power consumption. For instance all the previous iphone and ipod touch underclocked their processor and the new HTC incredible underclocks. Just about every embedded device underclocks as a higher speed processor often runs more efficiently at a lower speed than a processor designed to run at that speed.
If the iPad never runs at 1 GHz then we have a case of false advertising. If the iPad sometimes runs at 1 GHz, just not when executing JavaScript, that still sounds like a mistake given the complaints in this thread about sluggish performance.
(Disclaimer: I do power management for a living but I haven't used an iPad.)
The mbp is almost certainly dual core.
But is SunSpider multi-threaded?
I don't know, but the iPad has only one core with which to service both the JavaScript (and browser in general) but also other OS processes. That has to count for something.