Really? I constantly run into disk space issues. Apple still ships their flagship 13" macbook pro 128gb storage and they charge $200 for another 128gb. While other manufacturer's laptops charge a lot less for storage these days, most still only come with 256 which is not enough these days for development IMO.
Even on my desktop, I managed to fill 750GB with various VMs and android development tools (the SDKs, etc). While I am not sure how much compression could have saved me, it could still be worth it (especially since I only use certain VMs or SDK version once a month).