If you really want to get basic about it, the A400M has as many wheels as a C-17 and weighs half as much, and weighs twice as much as a C-130 but has three times as many wheels. It's an indicator of priorities as well as performance - landing gears are heavy.
As for the scintillating prose cited by Modern Elmo re "Rhino Snot", there are two points there. One is that the C-17 was at least good enough to do it at all (to wit, not a C-5 or an advanced C-141) and the other is that it wasn't really a sustainable operation.