My first impression was the same as yours. Boot went from about 55 seconds to about 45. The problem with those claims of "boot takes only 7 seconds", or whatever, is that you don't know where they are measuring from and what they're calling "boot". From power on, the computer goes through a few tasks... POST, boot, loading drivers, loading start-up programs and peripherals. It's not really "ready to go" until all of that is finished. Still, the computer is a bit snappier all around... perhaps not enough to justify the expense in some user's eye.... partly because the user may not be doing much of what an SSD excels at. One place I really notice a speed increase is when I "open all" charts in a folder. With 6,000 records per chart, my SSD will load 50 charts in about 2 seconds (X25-M, 160GB, G1). So, it really IS fast at that function... but how often do I actually do that? Not at all... except when I want to see how fast it does it. (Interestingly, it takes the same 2 seconds to load those charts with only 250 records per chart. Obviously, the video card displaying (more like "flashing") each chart is the bottleneck slowing the demonstration... the SSD itself is even much faster..... the 50 charts are closed in <1 second.) BTW... The X25-V is really well liked.... especially when 2 are used in Raid 0.
I`m so done with hard drive noise. I put one in my laptop(Kingston 128GB) - it`s silent. Gonna get one in next desktop, or shall I say replace the SATA drive as none of the major computer makers seem to have an SSD option yet.
I think adding a SSD, which would jack the cost up by at least $100, would make them less price competitive. As the general laptop consumers probably have no need for it yet. At today's price level, adding even a 40GB SSD costs more than $100. And 40GB is not quite enough for today's use. They would need to put a SSD and a regular platter disk... space concern. A SSD ~128GB or higher is quite a bit more expensive.