I heard all of the claims about SSDs in this forum, and quite frankly, I was skeptical. I never noticed slowdowns, using HDDs. I'm a patient person, I guess.
The one thing that finally got me to get an SSD, was some objective data - virus/malware scans ran much faster, and could run in the background without lagging up the whole computer.
So I happened upon some OCZ Agility 30GB SSDs that finally came back in stock at Newegg, for $40 ea. I bought several of them, for all of my rigs, and then some. (I think I bought the limit. Gave one to a friend of mine.)
So I kind of jumped in with a bang, although, they didn't seem hugely faster than a HDD, except for the malware scans.
Actually, I had purchased a prior SSD, a Kingston V-series (relabeled Intel X25-V 40GB) for $95 on some prior "Hot Deal". After finding out about TRIM, and the need for it in order to maintain performance, and the fact that the Kingston firmware was never getting the official Intel TRIM-capable firmware update, I gave it to a friend to mess with. He was very impressed with it.
I did get burned, I splashed out $239 for a 240GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe SSD, supposedly one of the largest and fastest SSDs on the market at the time, and it died in less than a month. SandForce 2nd-gen bugs, I guess.