I really hate these kinds of benchmarks. No-one will ever have jQuery as a bottleneck on their application.
There's also the fact that you don't have to include a gigantic library of functions you'll never use, just to show a box when you click a button. 37kb is way over 10% of my ideal page load for a simple to moderate site.
i'd say 87% of the pages on the web have graphics whose importance is sketchy, and whose total size dwarfs 37k.
and since i almost always do _something_ which has been found to show cross-browser inconsistencies, the peace that jquery gives _me_ is well worth those paltry 37k...
that's me. other people might be different. but that's me.
-bowerbird