I got my 160GB from buy.com ebay store, I also used 10% bing cashback, so essentially I got my drive for $400 shipped. Still expensive, but to put it into perspective newegg has the drive listed at $500, currently OOS, but they had it in stock for a couple of hours this weekend.
Anyway, I installed Windows 7 this weekend on my intel drive and while I still haven't installed all of my applications on it (it will probably slow down as I install more and more apps), it is noticeably faster than my old WD6400AAKS.
Old rig:
One drive WD6400AAKS, three partitions, 100GB for Vista 64bit, 100GB for WinXP (I dual boot), and 400GB for data including VMWare images.
New Rig:
Two drives, three partitions, Windows 7 64bit installed on X25-M 160GB G2 one partition, Samsung HD154UI with 2 partitions, 100GB for WinXP and 1.4TB for data to be used by both Win7 and WinXP.
Everything else stayed the same. Abit IP35Pro/9550 at 3.4GHz/8GB Ram.
A couple of completely subjective scenarios. Photoshop CS4 load times are noticeably faster, about 2-3 times as fast, although this is kind of unreliable benchmark as I found CS4 load times inconsistent because it definitely loads slower the first time, consequent load times are faster. Pausing Fedora Virtual Machine in VMWare is definitely faster with new rig. On old one it would usually take 5-7 seconds, on new one it takes 1-2 seconds max, although once again, this benchmark is a little unreliable because VMWare virtual machines are now kept on Samsung drive, so I do not know how much of a difference is due to Intel SSD, and how much of it is due to moving VMWare images to a different drive. One last subjective benchmark, I usually keep 3 Firefox instances open with about 80 tabs between them (I need to cut back on those). On Vista and mechanical drive it was always a pain to start firefox with all those tabs, it was also a pain to shut down computer with those tabs open. It's gotten so bad on old rig that occasionally it would take several minutes to shut down my computer. Horrendous. On new rig opening firefox with 80 tabs is much faster and firefox becomes responsive much sooner, it also shuts down instantaneously and I do mean instantaneously. Those 3 instances of firefox with 80 tabs close in less than a second. Fabulous. Shutting down my computer now takes less than 10 seconds instead of a 30-120 seconds before.
Overall, yes, performance is noticeably better, I like how my computer is much more responsive, but.... $400 price tag bites. Chances are if you're HDD limited, you will notice big difference, however, it is up to you if it's worth extra $200-500. For me, looking back I still think $400 is little too expensive, enough to second doubt my decision to buy one, but hopefully it will get better as I actually use the system.
P.S. Windows 7 STILL FREAKING REARRANGES MY FAVORITE VIEW in explorer. All I want is detail view with filename, type, size and modifydate, unless I decide otherwise, yet it STILL insists on showing thumbnails when I open folder with video files. Screw you Microsoft for being so mind numbingly stupid.
P.P.S. somebody already mentioned this review in another thread, but I think it's worth posting here as well. Anandtech did
The SSD Relapse: Understanding and Choosing the Best SSD aka "SSD Anthology II" review, which now includes proper x25-m G2 review alongside with G1 and Indilinx drives. It also explains in greater detail SSD performance drop and compares "new" and "used" performances between all drives. Some surprising results, G1 random write performance is actually faster than G2 in new state, however G2 doesn't drop performance much when used and in "used" state comes out on top, even without TRIM support.