This saddens me as C++ is growing into such a beautiful language. C++11 is a major step forward, and I don't really buy in to complaints that are not about the current standard.
Bad programming is language agnostic. Disliking a language generally implies that you don't know enough about it to really get it.
This is what I thought of immediately except to implement the end with behavior you have to override the IDisposable shut down sequence? (does that make sense?)
Defeating poorly optimized c++ code is far from impressive. I would also recommend NOT running any performance tests on EC2 since they throttle cpu unpredictably.
architecture is very important. Knowing how L1 and L2 cache work, instruction pipelining, branch prediction etc... can really change the way you program.
Also if you have done a lot of OO maybe its time to pick up a functional language on the side? F# is kind of fantastic...