I bought the high end 21" iMac (increased clock speed, GT 750m GDDR5 1Gb) and for what I use it for it is very noticeable. Even if you are just web browsing, I felt that the Iris Pro was loosing a few frames when scrolling through websites wit lots of images or JavaScript but the 750m handles everything great I think for light use, you may not notice, but anything on top of that gradually gets more apparent. Hope this helped.
If you are deciding between the 2 21" iMacs, I would highly recommend the higher end one if you are fine with the increase of price. Bot CPU & GPU performance is amazing on the high end 21". Love it.