I have Gemini and ChatGPT and keep them on the highest thinking settings. ChatGPT will regularly think 40-60 minutes on the same problem that Gemini will think 10-15 minutes on. The quality of ChatGpt’s response is usually a little higher but not that much higher. My takeaway is Gemini is better at thinking faster, maybe has better more dedicated hardware behind it, and I use Gemini if I want a faster answer but ChatGPT I’d I want to push the quality of the answer a little higher.
I have the same experience, where Gemini thinks dramatically less than ChatGPT (or Claude), while achieving 90%-95% of the answer on it's first go. I'm surprised this isn't talked about more, because the difference is stark, usually around a factor of 5. This shows up in benchmarks too, where Gemini consistently uses many fewer tokens per solve.
So while ChatGPT produces a correct and/or thorough result after 10 minutes, Gemini got most of the way there in 2 minutes. The downside being you need to prompt again to get to the same level as ChatGPT, but you also can get ~5 prompts in the same amount of time.
I have claude to, but I use it the least because it limits so quickly. However its thinking time seems to be on par with ChatGPT