You missed the interesting part...

Supposedly the interesting thing with intels SSD is their controllers.

There is a pretty insightful article at anandtech:

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

where they discuss the difference in wear-levelling and block management between Intels latest and the ubiquitous JMicron controllers used by everyone else. (Admittedly it reads like PR from Intel, but it still contains some interesting comparisons.)

The problem with Flash is that you need to erase a whole block in order to write a small amount of data. Typically the blocks are large (128 - 512kb) and erasing is slow. (On the order of several ms, up to hundreds of ms depending on power supply, memory contents and the phase of the moon.)

(Also noted at arstechnica: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/hardware/macbook-air-ssd-review.ars/1

and even by the reg: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/07/22/sandisk_ssd_vista_beef/ )

It would have been interesting to see how Intes new controller handles all these aspects. (According to Anandtech pretty well, but I'd love to have it corroborated by you.)

VMs?

Hmm... Tom's piece notwithstanding, I'd be interested to see how it speeds up my VMs. I have a number of (yes, defragmented) VMware VMs running demos and trials, and I can often sit waiting for several minutes while they sort themselves out - particularly the busier ones, and especially if I have too much running in the host and they start swapping. If an SSD knocked that down by even half, it'd be worth the money...

more on Tom's

Tom's followed up the SSD piece with this:

www.tomshardware.co.uk/ssd-hard-drive,review-31086.html

Comparissons...

would have been nice to see a comparisson with the OCZ core V2..

ah well ho hum..