I picked up a Vertex 120GB yesterday.
Took me 12 hours to install Windows 7 Beta. It would hang on installation repeatedly while trying to "expand files" which is taking a Vista image and expanding it to the drive. If you fail a Vista/7 installation this way, you can't do a "rollback" which is just deleting the installation files on the disk. The computer would blue screen while loading the rollback application. You really need at least 2 working operating systems as a fail safe before attempting to install an OS on this drive since the "rollback OS" is not going to play well with the drive until after you format it, which of course, is impossible to do so from the OS you installed it from. Every time it was goto XP (my backup OS) delete partition, repartition with a 3rd party program to get the disk aligned, format with the right allocation size, then reboot, go into Vista Ultimate in order try to install an OS on the SSD again. Another annoying thing is, you have to disconnect EVERY HARD DRIVE when attempting to do a boot installation on this drive, which at first I chalked at but learned the hard way through wasted hours.
It finally got finished yesterday. Like another poster in hardforum noted, this drive can't handle bit torrent without stuttering. Read performance is good, but still not that impressive coming from a 300GB Raptor. In Fallout 3 and Crysis I still get the classic stuttering when textures are getting loaded (not momentary stutter, but reoccuring stutter for a period of time) which is wonderful when you are getting chased around. Write performance is pretty bad, it takes about twice as long to install anything than it would on a Raptor, but I knew that already from the sequential write benchmarks it lagged behind the Raptor by 55% so it's quite a bit slower than a 7200rpm hard drive in this regard.
All in all, was this worth $450? No. Performance is up in some areas but down in others, noticeably in both directions. I don't have a boot loader any more, since if I have one, the Vertex drive doesn't show up (well documented in OCZ forums). It has some significant usage limitations (such as torrenting) which some of us take for granted. If I wasn't so apprehensive about RAID (2 x 1 TB array failed on me) I'd say RAID 0 Raptors is still probably your best bet for all around performance.
Well, I'm on borrowed time anyway, lets see how many years it'll last before the drive dies. I still have a 74GB Raptor from 2001, 8 years going strong.