At work, my IT guys tried to talk me out of an SSD drive on the laptop I purchased last summer....they said it was too small and they also talked about speed slowdown over time (still on xp, so not trim support). My old laptop (3 1/2 years old) had an 80 gb hard drive (upgraded from 40 originally because the first drive failed), and I only had that half full. So now I have a 128 mb SSD that only has 40 gb. I didn't even request the 256 mb SSD because in my work environment it is not necessary.
I am a really happy camper at how much faster the computer boots, runs my backup program and responds to program launches. There is no contest between SSD (winner) and conventional hard drive (loser)
The new laptop also has an SD card slot which can add 32 gb for $50, or 64 gb for more $$. I expect that if I change my habits and need more memory that--with falling SD card prices and increasing capacities--in a year I could easily add SSD storage that exceeds my demands for a very reasonable amount of money.