It is very interesting hearing the experiences of others. At the end of the day a lot of it probably boils down to user habits and luck.
I can only go off my own experiences in the field (likely to be different from others though). Going in order of best to worst of your list:
1) Norton
2) Kaspersky
3) MSE
4) McAfee
5) AVG
I think the problem with MSE and AVG is a lot of the time the user is not running a firewall or is only running a one-way Windows/hardware firewall. Firewalls are a pretty important part of preventing viruses, some people don't realise that unfortunately.
It's fair to say AVG is pretty much reviled in our shop these days, rubbish detection rates, a tendency to break every five minutes and you have to remove the damn thing to run ComboFix.