Pre-release statements and via their Reference Tablet (Which has a heavy heat sink back) Intel made it seem as though the Core-M would compare favorably with a Haswell i5 like in the SP3. to date nothing released by any vendor with a Core-M and benchmarked has shown to be anywhere near the SP3s performance.
As far as reports about the i3/i5/i7 having the same performance that is categorically untrue when looking across all benchmarks. An individual benchmark which only test one function may show one or the other better but taken as a whole the 3 fall in line performance wise. Depending on your specific workload you may or may not *notice* much difference but that's not an accurate indictor. I have seen a room of people at work watch a video demonstration of a performance problem and they failed to pick up on it until I pointed it out and the problem wasn't really that subtle. Benchmarks are good at making comparisons but you cant pin all your hopes or expectations on only one. On the other hand users perceptions & accounts can widely vary given the same or different performance levels making them an unreliable indicator.
Microsoft could have used the lower powered Y series parts instead of the U series and achieved less throttling but I think its safe to say they got better overall from the sometimes throttled i5U/i7U than they would have with the i5Y/i7Y.
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