The discussion (and moaning/whining) on the Buy.com stuff aside...
I think there's some confusion over hubs and switches, with manufacturers contributing to this problem.
There are hubs sold with liberal use of the word "switch" on the boxes, such as:
http://www.trendware.com/products/100Mbps/dual/spec-te100dx24rplus.htm
Some companies are even more obvious than this. I've seen dual-speed hubs advertised as "16 Port 10/100 Switch" without saying they're a hub at all, but were indeed hubs. Now, how can they call a hub a switch? I've seen two reasons. One is that the hub automatically "switches" between 10 and 100 based on what you plug into the port (whoopdeedoo). The other is like the slightly more honest TRENDnet hub where the hub partitions itself into two segments, one 10 and one 100, and the "switch" part communicates between the segments. Still, note that it does specify "capable of cascading up to four hubs per stack" which identifies itself as a hub (otherwise known as a repeater).
So, what makes for a "real" switch? Try this one:
http://www.trendware.com/products/100Mbps/switch/spec-te100s1616.htm
Made by the same company, using the same chassis as the previous example. Note that it is an "N-way" switch. These devices offer ½ to 1 MB per port RAM buffer. "Built-in 8K entries per device for Filtering Address Table" I have no idea what that means, but it seems that "true" switches have address tables, versus "switching hubs." Since each port gets pretty much full bandwidth, the device itself needs to be able to handle high bandwidth, thus "2.1 GB switching fabric."
My point in all this is that even if it is called a "switch," it may not be a true N-way switch like you think it would be.
BTW, my company upgraded from a 24 port 10/100 hub to a 24 port N-way switch (with VLAN and trunking). No real performance gains, but of course collisions are reduced, plus we have fewer problems with all the hubs we cascade into the switch (up to 6, LOL, more than there should be). The VLAN part works, where we have two different networks here needing access to the same servers and our router, but that are invisible to each other. Trunking, we have not tried, but it is supposed to allow a super high speed connection between two of these switches where up to 4 cables can be used to connect two switches with trunking ability, meaning 800Mbit bandwidth (duplex) between the two, giving 4X the bandwidth over non-trunking switches/hubs that only uses one cable to cascade two devices.