I'll just do a sound chip comparison for my contribution to this thread using the power of youtube links to illustrate a point about the Super Nintendo vs. Genesis:
Super Street Fighter II - Cammy Stage Theme (Genesis)
vs.
Super Street Fighter II - Cammy Stage Theme (SNES)
The difference is clear as night and day with the Genesis barely being able to reproduce half the notes, audio channels or sound effects with it's incredibly limited GYM sound chip. I'll also say that the SNES SPC soundchip had a wicked reverb effect which to this day has not been replicated on any video game system.
To the Genesis' credit it did have one feature over the SNES which was it's ability to buffer several frames of animation and backgrounds before they would be rendered by the hardware which was what allowed for that feeling of speed and moving across the stage really fast in Sonic The Hedgehog games. That is in fact what they were actually referring to when they used the term "Blast Processing".....they just had to go and word it stupidly.
.....Alright one more comparison and that's it I promise. The SNES answer to "Blast Processing" was a little thing some people probably know about called "Mode 7" which was a pretty big breakthrough for the time in allowing the SNES hardware to rotate and scale backgrounds on the fly. The uses for this were numerous, but mostly used to simulate a 3D effect of an object moving closer to or away from the player with only a single graphic whereas the NES and Genesis would have to do it by swapping out multiple graphics on the fly which would take up additional space and not to mention looked really awkward.