Well the first thing to discount here is giving it to a Gun Writer. Gun Writers are PAID to say nice things about the things they are writing about, not necessarily what is reality. Case in point is the kind words all of them had to say about the 6.5 Creedmoor. All of those words ended up with all manufacturers immediately building rifles for the 6.5 and many rifles of all quality levels were sold. Good Commerce, yes. Sold a lot of rifles and ammo. Good reporting, no. Now with a few years of real world under the communal belt, the inadequacies of the 6.5 are slowly being revealed.
I use the Federal Ammunition tables for the ballistics for all of my comparisons. (Federalammunition.com) as well as the Federal Premium line for comparison between the cartridges. This information and much more is available on this web site in an easy to use manner.
For this comparison I am using Federal Premium Berger Hybrid Hunter ammo (p65crdbch1) 135 gr against Berger Hybrid ammo 140 gr (p270bch1) which is about as close a match as can be had with factory ammo. It's too bad that nobody makes Match ammo in .270 however some of the new hunting bullets by Federal, Hornady and Sierra are well up to being excellent target bullets and it would be interesting to see how the .270 compares to other long range firearms at 1000+ yards. (NOTE: my Tikka T3X, out of the box shoots groups of 0.48 inches with both Federal and Sig Sauer ammo. So far my handloads cannot get any appreciable improvement on the factory ammo)
The 6.5 leaves the barrel at 2775 fps. The 270 leaves the barrel at 2950. Advantage .270 by 175 fps. At 500 yards which is far as Federal takes their data out to, the 6.5 is down to 2049 fps, the 270 is down to 2123 fps. Advantage .270 by 74 fps.
Now let's compare energy. I'm going to cut this short and simply list energy at 500 yards. The 6.5 has 1258 foot pounds. The 270 has 1301 foot pounds. Advantage again .270. Long range (500 yards) velocity) As expected since the 6.5 leaves the barrel slower it is going to be slower at 500 yards than the .270.
Now let's move on to bullet drop at 500 yards., The 6.5 has a bullet drop of 42.7 inches. The 270 has a bullet drop of 38.5 inches. Advantage .270 by 4.2 inches.
Last but not least is wind drift with a 10 mph wind. The 6.5 drift is 15.7 inches, the .270 is 16.2 inches. Advantage 6.5 by a mere 1/2 inch.
Now can anyone tell me why the 6.5 is touted to be the superior hunting round, especially at long range? Has anyone bothered to compare the 6.5 to the .270 at 1000 or even 1400 yards? Probably not. That comparison might be enlightening, and being retired and on a fixed income I'm not going to spend any money on buying a rifle in 6.5 to prove it. I am sure there are many of you out there that own both rifles and have access to 1000 yard ranges that can check it out and report back here.