I think your facts are out of date. The latest SSDs beat hard drives in every category, sequential reads/writes and random reads/writes. SSD random write performance has been superior to the fastest hard drives for quite a while now. Performance is even better with TRIM and 4K alignment in Windows 7. It is sequential write performance that has typically been weak, but even that is no longer the case.

Oops, got my logic reversed in that second sentence..
The brakes almost couldn't stop the car with that much power.

Car and Driver tested the ability for brakes to overcome the power on the engine. In a 540hp Mustang they found that it nearly could. http://www.caranddriver.com/features/09q4/how_to_deal_with_unintended_acceleration-tech_dept

As for the emergency brake, it doesn't take a whole lot to overpower one of those. In my manual transmission car (which has over 300hp) I forgot the brake on once and was able to get going with no problem. It did make a horrible screeching noise though.

Its not quite that easy to add more space. RAIDZ and RAIDZ2 pools don't support expansion yet, so you have to be using mirroring to achieve expandability. And when you are using mirroring you have to add 2 more drives to expand an existing pool. Even when using mirroring I don't think you can remove drives like you say.

My HTPC is quieter and uses less power than the DVR I had rented from my cable company.