DX support originally came out of no where, which leads me to believe it was a rushed effort.
Blitz Research has at least five years of experience with the DirectX API, therefore any wrapper they write for it is clearly not rushed.
The bottom line is, if you're shipping a puzzle game or something else that is not geared towards FPS gamers with the latest hardware, it would be suicide to default to OpenGL.
I didn't say anything about defaulting to OpenGL. Rob's test was final and from it we can conclude that in every instance DirectX is inferior to OpenGL on the PC. The discrepancy in Rob's numbers is nothing to do with a rushed DirectX implementation (see above), and it certainly is not due to a work around for a problem with the implementation (see above).
Well since you've ignored the two most popular ranges of consumer-level cards entirely,
Excellent. You fell into my trivia and technicalities trap, which means I can then say...
I'd have to say that many, many more of my customers are using Intel than are using Wildcat, FireGL and Quadro put together.
I think nVidia has a 60% market share or something, therefore your numbers are obviously made up.