Is it just me or does every GC is faster argument boil down to: "All working real world examples are noticeably slower, but trust me, I know of this amazing GC that's actually faster it's just not in production use anywhere yet."
In fact many would argue that for small, short-lived objects that the Sun GC outperforms malloc/free. This is a topic of debate, obviously.
I still think that this is only the case for a tiny fraction of all the code out there (Java is f*ing fast these days), and will become less and less true with each passing year.
Of course, there are apps that require manual memory management, but they are becoming few and far between.