I too haven't read the review and I don't think I will be buying it just to read it, I'm here sat behind my keyboard, a happy avast user for two years and if avast were really bad, would I not be infected by now.
No I exercise caution and have a multi level approach to protection, I use avast, adaware, spybot S&D, spywareblaster, ewido and hijackthis on occasion as my main security programs; this backed up with exercising common sense should see most people right.
In some of the posts in this thread they are talking about trojans, now a trojan by its nature can be many things, adware, spyware, etc. and since avast is primarily an anti-virus program that happens to detect some other malware, it may well miss a trojan that is picked up by another AV but this is true for many AVs.
Yes avast can definitely improve its detections but does it make it bad, I don't think so. Some of the recent reviews from the likes of avcomparitives places AVGs detections below that of avast, yet this single review places it higher.
Now neither of this means they are bad AVs, just that in that particular test, not knowing how it was conducted and what samples were used, avast did less well. There is more to an AV than simple detection rate, yes it is an important factor, there are some that may well have great detections, but it doesn't provide email protection or P2P support, etc.
We all know (I hope), that prevention is better than cure so stopping a virus getting into you system is better than trying to remove it once established, so in this case better detection isn't necessarily going to protect you better. So all I'm trying to say is that you need to compare more than simply detection rate tests.