"It never ceases to amaze me how with every new GCC release"

please.. GCC speed has regressed since 2.95.
4.4 is the first release that attempt to change this and seems to succeed

"with every new GCC release, software vendors a few months later will come out and say how their software is now faster as a result"

I think this statement is problematic.

GCC size increased a lot, and as a result GCC became slower in some areas as well. In fact I think I am not alone when I say that GCC became a bit of a complicated mess, and that many would rather like to see smaller, faster compilers than GCC becoming bigger and bigger. (tcc was a half-hearted attempt at this)

GCC is so important now that basically nothing will work without GCC, but is GCC really moving in the right direction? There aren't really alternatives for "open source" projects. So basically all will be forced to use GCC, whether it becomes better or not. I think it would be better if a new framework would enter the nice GCC leaves out - which is optimizations for very small but very specific projects, rather than try a general approach to become the biggest mountain in the valley...

"It never ceases to amaze me how with every new GCC release, software vendors a few months later will come out and say how their software is now faster as a result."

And yet GCC still generates significantly slower code than VC++.

As I understand it, a lot of the best optimization techniques are patent-encumbered, which limits the competitiveness of any open source compiler. GCC also makes design compromises in favor of supporting many different source languages and target platforms, but this latest release has made an effort to make this versatility compatible with good performance, which is good to see.

There certainly are alternative compilers out there, not to mention plenty of other languages besides C or C++ which are actually more appropriate for most application development. C is really quite a lousy language unless you are writing an OS, device driver or embedded app; C++ was cutting edge 20 years ago but now it's badly out of date. It's not surprising that nobody wants to waste their time starting yet another C/C++ compiler from scratch when there are already plenty of good entries in this category and those languages are obsolescent.