When are you gaming? 2006? You need 3GHz if you're playing anything that's come out in the past year or two, or your framerate will be in the toilet.
Maybe if you're putting your settings at the bare minimum (or forcing them lower), you might get that high with 2.8.
I didn't know they clocked Phenoms that low. Whatever, it doesn't matter. In most mid-range processors, you're going to have very little variation on any of those metrics that you listed, which is why clock speed matters so much; it's the only metric with significant variation. If you get something priced through the roof that, for whatever reason, has a low clock speed, then yes; that particular processor will probably outperform the 3GHz mid-range thing. However, I'm assuming TS budget isn't high enough to get something like that (at least not in a laptop). Comparing two near-identical processors with different clock speeds, the one with the 2.8GHz clock will give significantly lower framerates than the one with the 3.*GHz clock.
If you didn't have enough money for a high-range one, you would. Anyway, I wasn't talking about the difference between 2.8 and 3.0, more the difference between 2.8 and 3.3ish, which is a big enough difference (especially on a laptop) that you'll see an impact. And games that are computationally heavy will need a good CPU to support that, or performance will degrade.
I said 3.* in the previous post, so it appears I did not change what I was talking about. Maybe I wasn't clear enough, but I did mean mid 3.x GHz. And even if I didn't, my point still stands; there may be some games that don't suffer from a lower-clocked CPU, but the majority won't run well on a mid-range processor at <3.x GHz.
