Honestly, weighting knocks against weaker teams as a whole is a pretty error-prone way of going about things. Adam Gilchrist's knock in Fatullah, considering the state of the match and that Bangladesh had played out of their skins to that point, is one of the best he ever played. It's just under-rated because of the oppo and that oz won the game. The whole good vs bad bowling thing totally smoothes out factors like that.
On Ponting, his contribution goes well beyond mere stats and is a large part of why the Aussies just kept on winning throughout his era. Aside from all the stuff he contributed behind the scenes, when and how he scored as much as how many hurt his opponents badly. At the beginning of a match, someone needs to take the lead and assert themselves. The first guy to do that usually wins his team the match, sets the tone for the series and Ponting's mentality was that it was pretty much his duty to do so. When you have someone in your side who's that assertive, and he's the skipper, it lifts the rest of the team like almost nothing else.
It's better to get your hits in early and the Aussie side had several who could do it. You don't have too look hard to find more talented quicks than McG, spinners who had more variations than Warne or bats with more shots than Ponting but what separated them was their ability to get hits in fast and early. Before a lot of opponents even woke up Ponting had 50 and was looking to turn it into much more. You either respond or you die because there was no let-up and that's the essence of Ponting's contribution for mine because it's so, so hard to fight back in the face of that.
