It's really not the player vs class argument. And it's particularly hard to compare your friend to people in a PUG, you don't know how good the people are vs how good your friend is. And he was still behind the marauders and snipers, I've never seen anyone say that a DPS op topped the damage meters, or that a DPS op did as much as the Marauders and snipers. And I don't think you will until the class is balanced. And I don't even think it would be hard for BW to balance, it could be something as easy as removing the cooldown on Shiv. Vicious strikes and snipe don't have cooldowns, why does shiv? That would also help ops with the rotation issue which there is no room at all for error.
Easy fix: Remove the cooldown on Shiv and put the 6s cooldown on Lacerate instead (for concealment specced ops, something else would need to be done for lethality ops, but that could be something simple like boosting the DOT damage). That fix would make it way easier for Op/scoundrels to maintain their tactical advantage, would reduce the sensitivity of the rotation and it doesn't add any significant burst DPS to PVP. That would probably give op/scoundrels at least a little boost and would make the class a little more viable without breaking pvp. (I don't know the names of the scoundrel abilities.)