  Remarkable experimental advances in quantum computing are exemplified by
recent announcements of impressive average gate fidelities exceeding 99.9% for
single-qubit gates and 99% for two-qubit gates. Although these high numbers
engender optimism that fault-tolerant quantum computing is within reach, the
connection of average gate fidelity with fault-tolerance requirements is not
direct. Here we use reported average gate fidelity to determine an upper bound
on the quantum-gate error rate, which is the appropriate metric for assessing
progress towards fault-tolerant quantum computation, and we demonstrate that
this bound is asymptotically tight for general noise. Although this bound is
unlikely to be saturated by experimental noise, we demonstrate using explicit
examples that the bound indicates a realistic deviation between the true error
rate and the reported average fidelity. We introduce the Pauli distance as a
measure of this deviation, and we show that knowledge of the Pauli distance
enables tighter estimates of the error rate of quantum gates.
