SSD basically makes your pc faster. I don't think its even near worth 16k. It's more like a data storage RAM-drive. It's expensive because its not quite an old technology and I'm sure it will get really cheap in around the next two years or less time, who knows. Moreover, it's capacity is almost nothing and you already know about that. About the degradation, SSD acts more like a flash drive and so it's performance degrades with time and usage.
Clearly, SSD is not worth buying and as far as the manufacturer is concerned, Dell will never disappoint you. I just bought a Dell Mini 10 myself and I must say that it's better than all others out there at this price.
^ Well, then I think it will work more like a fast pen-drive with a little more life..it depends on how long do you want to keep the laptop. Again, it might be good for your use but according to me, it's very expensive just because it's new and if you really want to get a laptop with SSD, then you might want to wait for the prices to drop. They are also offering 320gb at 7200 RPM which is pretty fast along with the 4gb ram and that processor. The SSD would let you boot your pc or allow you to copy data some seconds faster than a normal drive does. Do you really think that's all worth a 15k? You could get a netbook with SSd for around 25k instead of buying that laptop for 60k.
^ Nice choice..
According to the amount of data I copy from and to my external seagate freeagent 1TB, I think I get pretty fast speeds on my pc. ( 35-38 MB/s)
I'm on a 4gb DDR2 @ 800 MHz Ram, and 400gb hard disk which I think is something around 5000rpm and my processor is a C2D @ 2.4 GHz
And
In XPS 13 you're getting a 4gb DDR3 @ 1066 MHz along with 320gb @ 7200rpm with a processor which is much better than mine.
You can now compare your laptop's config to my pc and know how much speeds you will actually get! I think that will give you the exact picture and help you with whatever left confusion you might still have with the SSD.