I\'d say roughly 10 - 20% of the judgement of the debate will be based on hardware information, as presented by the debaters. In other words, you\'ll try to argue the superior system overall. And most of the grading will be based on sucessful arguments, not just saying System X has a higher number of ABC than System Z. In fact, one of our judges (Korval from PCG & MSXBox) is a programmer who posesses the most knowledge of the hardware of these systems than anyone I\'ve ever known of.
And I agree. Hardware only plays a small part in determining the superior system. And it will in this debate.