Oh, very true--and it shows in the class. Draco seems to do okay in Potions, and he probably is a better Potions student to start with, but with Snape helping Harry out he's doing a lot better while Draco has to "rely on his talent."

What I think is really funny about that, though, is that Draco is good in Potions either naturally or because he blossomed under Snape's tutelage (he wouldn't be in the Advanced Potions class in HBP if he didn't have better than average capability, and I suspect that he actually got an "O" on his OWL whereas Harry *only* made it in because Slughorn was willing to except "E"-grade students (which Snape wasn't)). Even without extra-help from the SuperSpeshul AP text *g*, Draco did fine in Slughorn's class. Harry, OTOH, in the one instance where he *couldn't* rely on Snape's notes? Had no clue what he was supposed to do. Which is why it's the height of hilarious irony that he's all snideful about Draco having to "rely on his talent" -- because Draco *actually could*; Harry couldn't. He didn't have any innate or intuitive understanding or even especial technical understanding of Potions to help him when he couldn't look at the notes in the book. Slughorn likes the bezoar thing because it's really *cheeky*, not because it demonstrates that Harry has good innate Potions skill.