The result to me is no great surprise.
Auto Express first reviewed the S3 back in October 2006 (yes, I have the review, I'm a sad fecker! - in fact I have all the main reviews as PDF's, I should link them on here somewhere). Auto Express said as the S3 was a cousin of the wonderful Golf Mk5 it could never justify it's high price given that it didn't have the sparkling drive of the Golf. Once they'd cleared up their mess from fantasizing over the illustrious Golf, they found the time to award the S3 3* and then went back for another 'whack' over the Golf.
Autocar was one of the few magazines that I felt gave the S3 a respectable showing. They rated it highly, it was still beaten by the Megane R26 as an outright drivers car (no arguments there), but they could see that the S3 performs a very different duty to some of the other hyper-hatches; it has respectability. It carries itself so well you don't tend to get judged for it's pretensions, and that matters to me.
Ultimately by todays standards it is built on a very old platform, and interestingly the car in the review is a pre-facelift version which doesn't benefit from the revised Haldex system, so it will only feel worse still against spanking new competition. But whereas the S3 used to wear a heavy price premium, it must now be due a price uplift to a price point I probably wouldn't be prepared to pay for it. Given it's out of the box performance credentials I think its RRP is fair, but the Golf R pricing may see any new S3 going skyward to mid £30k's at base which I think is just too much (unless they bang in a 2.5!). I like the wider track of the Scirocco, and I like it's bold looks, but sit in one after the S3 and it feels....a bit odd. Can't put my finger on it, maybe it's just an adjustment thing I'd get used to over time.
I know it's easy to say you don't rate a magazine that gives your car a bad showing in a review, but I genuinely don't rate Auto Express reviews. And that issue aside, I still know which one I would rather have as Britain continues to have 190 days of average rainfall, and with stage 2+ Haldex keeps my car predominantly on the black stuff, and not additional hedge furniture.