1060 will be a bit faster than 480 but it will cost a bit more too.
Custom 1060 are likely to be a bigger improvement on stock 1060 than custom 480 will be on stock 480. Prices on 1060 OC customs will be higher than whatever 480 OCs will have as well though. The cards do not perform very close to each other unless you're talking only about titles known to favor AMD's h/w where this is true. 1060 will win on average and it will win pretty heavily in titles which favor NV's cards. At least that's my current expectation based on what specs we know and what I've heard. I guess you could say that +2GBs on 480 and the GCN base common with consoles give them a bit of a better future proofing so if you're worried about that then 480 is a better choice even though it will be slower right now.
1060 is actually pretty good compared to what we've had with 660, 760 and 960. Thanks to it's 192 bit bus it's landing a bit above a spot which is typically expected from a x60 card of the lineup.
But anyway, I'm sure tomorrow will be interesting. I'm sure there will be people who will decide to go with 1060 instead of 1070 for which they've planned earlier.
I agree with everything, but I think the performance will be close across a wide range of titles. Just because the 1060 might win in more titles by a bit doesn't mean performance isn't close. I dont think we've seen anything to suggest the 1060 will even be definitely 10% better than a 480 across a wide range of titles. And honestly based on the 1070 and 1080, the customs hardly do any better than reference if you can tolerate 70-80% fan speed. My 1070 FE does just as well as the aibs and fans are Max 75%, which honestly isn't noticeably louder than my previous 970 ssc. It does 2050/9200 stable and posts as good or better benches than virtually all of the aib 1070s I've seen. If aib 480s can do 1400mhz+ somewhat consistently, I think that would scale to better improvement than aib 1060s over the FE/reference. Doesn't seem unlikely when out of the box we are seeing 1350 for the aib 480s. On the memory side ref 480s can also do 9000mhz+ so I don't think there's a difference there.
As always, wait for reviews, but I do think long term the 480 will eclipse the 1060 overall for the reasons you stated, and I think the 256 bus will also be an advantage for resolutions above 1080P. Of course this is all just speculation and remains to be seen. Buy for now, not later, unless you won't upgrade for at least 2-3 years.
