... That is of course, as opposed to Juniper, which is truly line-rate at any interface, with any services, at any composition of traffic.
No. While I was at my former employer, we took our edge ACL into the Juniper POC lab, and verified that an M40 stuffed full of OC48 linecards could sustain just over 85% of line rate with our edge ACL applied before sustaining packet loss; the POC lab engineers double checked and verified that there was nothing wrong with the test, that was simply the most the IPII processors could handle with that particularly hairy ACL. There's no such thing as a perfect router--there will always be conditions under which any given device has suboptimal (read "sub-line-rate") performance. The trick is establishing what traffic patterns show up in *your* network, and purchase the appropriate hardware for _your_ traffic patterns.
-alex
Matt