Looking at an SSD as a future purchase myself.
When I get a Mac Mini and it's time to upgrade, I'm opening it once and that's for an SSD and 8Gb RAM Kit.
Looking at the comparisons on Barefeats between the Apple SSDs and the fastest 3rd party SSD installed in an iMac, it's definitely not hype or people deliberately slating Apple's SSDs, it's simply a FACT they under perform compared with the latest 3rd party SSDs (with lower capacities, so it's still a compromise unless you store most of your files on a separate drive).
Personally, I've always had the largest, fastest drive partitioned as 60Gb OS, the rest for file storage and a second dedicated drive for audio recording.
Add an SSD and the only change is partitioning the recording drive to 100Gb Audio and the rest file storage.
Here's the link to the Barefeats article and some numbers:-
http://www.barefeats.com/imac10d.html
Small Random Read:
OWC SSD 143Mb/s vs Apple SSD 100Mb/s
Small Random Write:
OWC SSD 156Mb/s vs Apple SSD 88Mb/s
7200 RPM Hard Drives were in the 20 - 34Mb/s range
Large Sequential Read:
OWC SSD 271Mb/s vs Apple SSD 204Mb/s
Large Sequential Write:
OWC SSD 264Mb/s vs Apple SSD 167Mb/s
7200 RPM Hard Drives were in the 119 - 122Mb/s range