I'm sure you'll all be pleased to know that
Publius took my advice (as he's been doing since he bought his first Mac, a blue PowerMac G3 tower, in 1995 or so) and ordered his new iMac with a 250 GB SSD and 1 TB internal SATA drive.
I'm betting it's a real speed demon.
But if any of you can convince him to ditch the fugly Microsoft keyboard, I'd be grateful. On that one, he doesn't listen.