The SUP feed is designed to be very compact. The SUP feed on FriendFeed (
http://friendfeed.com/api/sup.json) is only about 8 bytes per entry after gzip. If a service had 10 updates per second (which is faster than Twitter, for example), then a 60 second SUP feed would be 4800 bytes, which is tiny.
My expectation is that only large feed consumers (such as FriendFeed or Gnip) will fetch SUP. Smaller ones will probably use an intermediary service such as Gnip since they would only be interested in a small fraction of the updates.
They key purpose of SUP is to make it as easy as possible for feed publishers to let the world know which of their feeds have updated.