I'm putting way too much time into this, but I'm a geek!
I just happened to see a poll in another forum, that released its results today. A bunch of people (not sure how many, but at least 2 dozen) listed their top 25 favorite Beatles songs. When I looked over the results, I was struck by how many George songs were in the list of people's favorites, so I geeked out and did this little check.
If you use this page as a source:
http://www.stevesbeatles.com/songs/default.asp?sort=songwriteryou find that George wrote 22 Beatles songs. I'm leaving out joint instrumentals and post-1970 songs like FAAB. That leaves 169 Lennon/McCartney original compositions. That means George wrote 13% of these 191 original Beatles songs compared to L/M. Not very many.
But in this poll, 10% of the favorites ended up being George songs. Since he only wrote 13% of the songs to begin with, this is a pretty good percentage.
If you look only at the top 10 winners, 20% of the songs are George songs (carrying 26% of the vote), and 80% Lennon/McCartney. ("Here Comes the Sun" was #2, behind "Day In the Life".) So George's "masterpieces" (as Kevin called them earlier) seem to really stand out as highlights for many people in the Beatles catalog.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. It's just one poll that collects a bunch of people's opinions. ("Taxman" doesn't even appear on this list, so..?) But anyway, I think George made a definite contribution to the Beatles sound, and perhaps more of an impact on their memories than many people realize.
Okay, must stop geeking and get to work. Cheers, all!