Been messing with the Pi4 for the past couple hours, and here is what I get out of mine.
Notes:
Bluetooth is disabled (dtoverlay=disable-bt) in /boot/config.txt.
Not currently overclocked.
GPU mem set to 512mb, becasue why not, got 8GB available that I will never use. lol
Wired net connection, WiFi not being used.
These are the apps I use the most on mine. Performance in all these apps is great, with two exceptions, listed below.
Boot to desktop: About 15 seconds. (Cold boot.)
LibreOffice: About 2.5 seconds when closed. About one second with base loaded.
Fritzing: About 20 seconds (has a TON of assets to load).
Arduino IDE: About 4 seconds.
Geany: About 1.5 seconds.
Thonny Python IDE: About 1.5 seconds.
Chromium: About 3.5 seconds. (See notes below)
Firefox ESR: About 3.5 seconds. (See notes below)
VLC Media Player: About 1 second.
GIMP 2.10.8: About 5 seconds.
Synaptic Package Manager: About 4 seconds.
Thunar File Manager: About 1 second
Games & Emulators
Beneath a Steel Sky (ScummVM): About 1.5 seconds for ScummVM to start game.
ScummVM Alone: About 1 second.
Chocolate Doom: About 1.5 seconds.
DOSBox: About 1.5 seconds.
FS-UAE: About 3 seconds.
Steam Link: About 4.5 seconds. (Has no issues streaming 1080P games from my primary desktop PC.)
RetroArch: About 4 seconds.
Both Chromium and Firefox perform about the same. Their performance on sites like YouTube are most definitely painfully slow when it comes to loading the page and or video. Once a video is playing, the playback is hit and miss. Some videos play fine, others hiccup, and require you to bump down the resolution. That being said I really don't do a lot of video streaming on the Pi, today was the first time I really appreciated how slow it was on YouTube.
Image heavy sites like Amazon load slower on the Pi than on a desktop as well, but it's more than fine for someone like me, especially since again, I don't really do it much on the Pi. A vast majority of my Pi's web use is forums and searching for information, and in those cases, both browsers are plenty fast. I ran across several posts claiming the reason they are so slow with some sites, like YouTube, is more of a software/driver issue than hardware. Time will tell I guess.
Video playback from a local source using VLC however is flawless, at least it was with all the videos I tried, mostly all 1080P, streaming from my NAS.
While I most definitely would like to see better storage options and much improved performance on the image/video heavy side of the web. I can honestly say I am still pleased with it's overall performance. Then again, it's all going to come down to what you're wanting to do with it.
Now I guess it's time to overclock. These Argon cases have good cooling, so why not. ?
Edit:
Well, I just pushed it to 2GHz on the ARM, and 750 on the GPU, with an overvolt of 6. I can confirm, YouTube is still slow. lol
Honestly, I really didn't notice any real improvements over the stock operation. The system was "snappy" already, and the software I use already ran good. I will have to check it using something that will actually benefit from the faster clocks, maybe some more demanding console emulation.
I know one thing, I wont be leaving it overclocked. It does what I want it to do at stock, so no point in shortening it's life if it's not necessary and there is no real benefit to it for my specific use case.