The quietness argument is a new one on me. I guess you SSD guys are scraping the bottom of the barrel trying to find reasons to justify your purchases. I've never, ever with any of my computers ever felt the desire to make the HDD quieter, mainly because the other components generate more noise.
My argument isn't really about what he could have had - it's the fact that he's spent more money to get a lesser product. Sure you've got increase speeds with random read, but is this really worth Apple's crazy (and inflated) asking price when you're getting less space than a standard disk?