Honestly I think that Thunderdome-style Two Enter One Leaves threads miss and possibly mask a deeper problem with fighter/wizard game balance.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that a well-prepared fighter can take down a non-TO non-Schroedinger wizard exactly fifty percent of the time. (Yes, I know that's probably not the case above very low levels in even the best case scenario. Bear with me.) So we have our fifty percent one way, fifty percent the other - they're balanced, right? Each kills the other half the time.
Except they're not, because the fighter's entire class premise and strength is theoretically "this guy is good at killing things". The wizard's abilities include killing things, warping space, creating matter from nothing, controlling minds, discovering impossible-to-learn information, blah blah etc. For them to be balanced, the fighter has to be winning more than half the time, because winning fights is all he gets to be good at. The wizard really should be going "HOLY CRAP A FIGHTER" and doing his best to make sure the faceoff doesn't happen at all.
Needless to say, wizards don't go HOLY CRAP A FIGHTER. Not even in the most favorable arguments in favor of the fighter.
I dunno, I'm not breaking new ground here. For all my disagreements with Tome's worldsetting assumptions and decisions about what high-end play "should" be, this is a philosophical point where I agree with them and they've gone over it much more loudly and at length. This is just what bugs me each time I see a "fighters can totes kill a wizard if they do it right!" thread.