Depends on what you're doing. It's very noticeable for my work.
At home I have a desktop rig with multiple TB RAM and a fast server CPU. I would normally ssh into that to run tests with the chain mounted on a /dev/shm partition, which was a pain and only was accessible when I was at home. With my new MacBook Air, the upgraded internal drive is large enough to hold the full historical chain, and streams from disk fast enough to finish a run in comparable time. So now I’m mobile and can work from anywhere, with an entry point laptop replacing a dedicated server! That’s a big change for me.
I recognize not everyone’s tasks are bottlenecks the same way though.