RAID0 is not "useless" -- however, its only performance effect is to double STR when doing large reads and writes, and to allow multiple concurrent disk accesses if the blocks being accessed are on separate disks.
Doubling STR does very little for desktop computing -- most complex disk operations are constrained more by seek times than transfer rate. Unless you're loading and saving giant media files all the time, this won't help you much.
Most programs the average user is going to run are singlethreaded, and most singlethreaded programs (like games) do not try to do concurrent background reads and writes (plus, at least with a two-disk RAID0, half the operations will collide anyway). RAID0 (especially with four or more disks) might help if you are multitasking (for instance, running a virus scan in the background while copying files around, or something like that), but is unlikely to make games or single applications any faster.
RAID1 gives you data protection through mirroring, and doubles STR and lowers seek time for reads only. It's lowering the seek time for reads that makes 'normal' operations slightly faster.
So, yes -- basically, the average user will see little to no performance benefit from RAID0 or RAID1.
SATA by itself offers no performance advantage over regular ATA. Unless you're going to run 10KRPM 'Raptor' drives, or you have newer disks and controllers with TCQ/NCQ, it won't be any faster.
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