More specifically, Nano Banana is tuned for image editing: https://gemini.google/overview/image-generation

Yep, Google actually recommends using Imagen4 / Imagen4 Ultra for straight image generation. In spite of that, Flash 2.5 still scored shockingly high on my text-to-image comparisons though image fidelity is obviously not as good as the dedicated text to image models.

Came within striking distance of OpenAI gpt-image-1 at only one point less.