[citation][nom]a sandwhich[/nom]Why not a tegra 3? That sucks.[/citation]
Nvidia is stubborn, and doesn't think tile based rendering is a good strategy on Smartphones (they're wrong). And as such, their GPUs are outperformed by nearly everyone in 3D... as in things like gaming. The Quad Core A9 is outperformed by dual core A15s in a lot of things... making the Tegra3 SOC, something that is more marketing hype than an actual strong performer.
Qualcomm's S4 is actually the better SOC, IMHO. It outperforms Tegra 3 in battery life in pretty much all scenarios, has better browser performance, better performance in tests like linpack (by a wide win margin at that), and is generally just much faster than Tegra3 in CPU performance. GPU, well... it has a Adreno 225, which performs very similarly to Nvidia's GPU. In some cases it's a little slower, though. Both Nvidia's POS GPU and the Adreno 225 would be utterly destroyed by a decent PowerVR GPU, and are slower than the newer Malis.
I guess my point is that the SOC in this version of the SIII is actually a lot better than the International version.