I have a laptop with SSD at work and an almost identical laptop at home, except it has a hard drive. There are unquestionably a lot of operations that the SSD makes much faster. But in normal day to day use, I can barely tell the difference. Booting is fast as hell, but how often do I reboot? I don't compile much on either machine, but neither do most normal users. I don't think the average laptop user is i/o bound most of the time (unless they're swapping, and then the solution is more RAM not an SSD).

To me, the biggest benefit SSD gives is battery life. I like that it's quieter too. But neither of those is worth the price premium. Which is why I haven't stepped up for my home machine even though I get to compare it on a daily basis.

For many, it's simply that the increased initial load time isn't worth our time/money.

The biggest bang for the buck comes in the form of added RAM, which augments the kernel's buffer cache on any modern OS. Many of us rarely shut down our hosts (perhaps to update the kernel, but that's about it) so we rarely have a cold buffer cache.

For the average desktop/laptop user, unless your memory usage patterns involve allocating massive heap sizes for fun and profit, or grepping through every file in your filesystem, it's extremely likely that any application you launched or document you opened in the past few days is already in the kernel's buffer cache. And the buffer cache is much faster than any SSD.

I do care and I have no doubt that SSDs are faster and better. I too am holding off until their reliability improves. But I just tested starting my iMac with a 7200 RPM drive in it and it took 31 seconds from the startup chime until I was able to fully use it. So I can also understand people's hesitation.

And besides, if I booted over to Windows 7, it'd take about 4 minutes until this machine was usable, so it's all a matter of perspective.

EDIT: to be fair I just measured Windows 7 and it took 1:30 before the machine was usable.