Well as we hear from most everyone <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" /> heat treat is the biggest thing in making a good knife with great characteristics. Steel components, yes, will make some characteristics easier to attain but heat treat is still a whole hellauvalot more important.
I'm sure you've seen differential heat treated 1095 that can easily out perform S30V. You've already seen SR-77 and its performance compared to other knives that have the so called "super steel" (knifetests.com) with a decent heat treat.
I'm not sure if same heat treat on two different steels will give the exact same qualities, but they should be rather similar.
Heat treat will also depend on the components in the steel. You definitely won't be heat treating Gin-1 the same as S30V.
Bring it to the yard, SR-77 is actually very different from S-7 due to the heat treat, even though it has the same steel components. S-7 doesn't have that great of edge holding characteristics, (do a side-by-side comparison with hemp rope, you'll notice it immediately) compared to SR-77, but it is shock absorbent when heat treated with a "normal" protocol. SR-77, because of the 27 hour heat/cryo treat, has, actually, quite good edge retention, while still retaining a high amount of toughness.
Moving further to the atomic level, steel itself, when manufactured is basically just blobs of various elements, iron and carbon mostly, combined to together through a metallurgical process, it's somewhat uniform. The bonds that the elements formed, however, aren't strong, which allows for easily cutting and shaping, etc. What the heat/cryo treat is make the bonds between the elements stronger. More specifically the heat/cryo treat is trying to form a strong matrix(graphite to diamond, diamond matrices are far stronger than graphite matrices). Carbon (diamonds!!!) -one key characteristic of why carbon is so useful is its tetrahedral shape and 4 free open valence electrons, but in steels the tetrahedral shape is the biggy, ever see a diamonds matrix?- is one of the key elements in creating a matrix. A carbide is just a fancy name for a Carbon and element compound. The various other elements that we see (numbers and letters) are just some elements that carbon can bond with to form a carbide.
So what a heat/cryo treat does to the steel is make a uniform matrix of carbon and other elements. The heating weakens what ever bonds were made during the initial manufacturing of the steel and, also, causes the elements to form newer bonds with carbon, thus forming various carbon element matrices. The cooling, freezes these carbides in place. So after a finished heat treatment, the steel has a completely different characteristic to it's manufactured state.
INFI's components are still unknown. However, I've seen numerous tests with SR-101 and INFI (Noss4 for one, and Blade Show West, 360joules had a little video playing with destruction tests of SR-101). They are very similar.
