Are they handing out green koolaid somewhere on these forums or something? Seriously... where do you guys get this stuff?
The INSTANT you start talking about overclocking the card beyond what it ships at, you are no longer talking about "out of the box". If you want to talk about overclocking, I'll talk to you about how a $450 (or less) 7970 will overclock to almost the same performance as a manually overclocked 680 Lightning for $100 less.
Your argument reeks of an Nvidia fanboy desperately trying to hide the fact that his favorite team no longer makes the fastest individual GPU on the market. I'm sure eventually one of Nvidia's partners will release a 680 that is clocked higher to try to take down this Toxic, but right now nobody has.
It's worth pointing out that the Toxic, overclocked ~6%, still appears to be faster than the Lightning overclocked ~10%:
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/MSI/GTX_680_Lightning/images/perf_oc.gif
http://tpucdn.com/reviews/Sapphire/HD_7970_Toxic_6_GB/images/perf_oc.gif
So please put the green koolaid away. Does it really matter that a stupidly overpriced $700 graphics card that almost nobody will buy offers the best performance on the market? It really shouldn't, even if you are hurt that Nvidia doesn't have anything that fast.