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Developers often do more than simply compile code. For example if I could cut the start up time of the app I'm developing in half that would be really quite nice indeed, even if compile times stay the same.

I don't know about that, it depends on the build tree I guess. Our IDE build tree (which includes compiler, RTL and lots of other stuff) writes about 600M of intermediate files, 1G of executables / debugger symbol files / map files etc., and reads probably several G worth of source. A rebuild (clean and build) currently runs in about 13 minutes on my 10K drive, but I'm fairly sure it could be cut down with faster I/O.

Actually Spolsky had already found that to be true for their compile times back in March. But decided the benefit was still worth it for his developers. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html