Ha! I get linked from a comment and I see a spike in traffic. Slashdot is the flow machine. In any case, there are some misstatements in that comment that I'd like to answer. First, I'm not "the guy from Microsoft behind Avalon." Rather I'm one on a large team of developers. My particular area is the graphics APIs. Avalon is much more than just graphics.
Second, managed code is a different beast that unmanaged code. While it can make programmers more productive and I totally think that it is the way of the future, a developer can write bad code in any language. While right now I don't think that anyone would claim that managed code is faster than unmanaged code, the difference is generally not that great. I've heard of some research that suggests that future JITs may be able to apply run time directed optimizations and recompilation that could make managed code faster. But that world isn't here yet.
In the parlance of our time: "Just my 2 cents"