But true, there's definitely no beating a hand-tuned optimized C/assembly implementation of anything!
I should add, this isn't just a hand-tuned, optimized implementation of general ECDSA signature verification: it's hand-tuned and optimized for the specific elliptic curve that Bitcoin uses (secp256k1). The curve is actually one of the simpler ones blessed by NIST, and sipa is an optimization ninja
People who actually understand cryptology are like the evil chess grandmaster james bond villains.