Lightroom 4 or Aperture?

Aperture. It's the best.
Well I was one of the lucky few to get my hands on one of the new Retina Display Macbook Pros when they first came out and have recently gotten into photography with a Sony A56 (Which I love!) and was wondering which photography program would be better to get. Lightroom 4 or Aperture?

If Aperture wasn't available I'd use Lightroom, because it's excellent, but it doesn't compete with Aperture for a solo photographer.

Lightroom is a better choice for working team photographers who have to share raw work with other teams, because it runs on windows which other teams may be using, but for the solo photographer with a Mac, Aperture is the superior choice (albeit marginal).

Lightroom has two features where it kills Aperture, perspective correction and chroma noise reduction. If you constantly shoot with wide lenses from distorted angles, or in insufficient light, these conditions could swing it for Lightroom (and this applies to smaller sensor raw capable cameras where light is nearly always insufficient)

But for everything else, Aperture matches or bests Lightroom. Some of these areas will be subjective and therefore debatable, but some are a simple feature-count or checklist which are facts (although even these become out of date due to upgrades, in both directions).

At introduction both competed on comparable features, but with recent releases, they have taken different roads. Lightroom offering more processing features, while Aperture offers more integration features.

On balance, that should have swung it in Lightrooms favour, because processing is the main end result, but the truth is, I take many more shots than needed and so culling and rating is a big task at the start of my workflow. Of those I keep, only a small percentage get used, so again, Apertures superior organising wins. Of those used, most require only a degree of finessing, at which both Aperture and Lightroom are equally capable. It's only when I come to those select images which need extra (sometimes extreme) attention that Lightroom begins to score points. But in this regard, even though Lightroom would score higher, there are much better options than either Aperture or Lightroom, and for this, I use the NIK suite. So for me, this negates Lightrooms wins, and gives it to Aperture. Apertures gaps can be plugged, Lightrooms can't.

This all may seem like a huge bias towards Aperture, but that's only because I use it daily and small (even tiny) differences become significant. As I already said, if Aperture wasn't available I'd have no problem switching to Lightroom. Lightroom is great and it would be a fairly small inconvenience and still a great solution. But for as long as Aperture is here, that's what I'm taking. For me, it really is better.