Okay . . .
"your posting implies it's much more recently that such parity was reached."
I don't see it that way -- I only said "in recent years" -- but okay.
"postgresql has, until within the last year, beaten mysql in the enterprise class functionality and security areas. now they are fairly equal in those areas due to mysql's improvements to those areas."
Not really. MySQL can't manage to maintain parity with more than a small handful of such functionality areas at a time, because you have to swap out the storage engine it uses to get at the different feature sets. People talk about all the great features MySQL has, without mentioning that you get a few from InnoDB, a few others from Falcon, and a few others from MyISAM.
For instance, you talk about how PostgreSQL and MySQL are about equal in speed, but you only get there with MyISAM (and maybe a couple of other feature-poor storage engines like BDB, which is famous for falling on its face and hosing all your data), which means giving up really important functionality like ACID compliance. You get ACID compliance with InnoDB, but to get that you give up speed and advanced replication. You can't do full-text searching without MyISAM -- which, again, simply isn't stable (lacking transactional integrity).
The Falcon storage engine is promised to cure cancer, of course. On the other hand, it's in Beta right now, and so far seems to be faster than other storage engines only in select operations, and slower in others. I've seen nothing to suggest full-text indices. It doesn't seem to solve the problem that, as far as I'm aware, no MySQL storage engine can use multiple indices per table per query. I don't think it does partial indices at all. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
