100%, SSDs make a massive difference in perceived performance. That laptop (it was an AMD V140, it was the Compaq CQ56 shit-top they sent out to replace laptops after bumpgate) was completely unusable with a HDD in windows but between a SSD and lxde it became marginally tolerable. It certainly wasn't fast but it could browse the web and it could play hardware-accelerated youtube if you used H264, etc.

I actually would not be surprised if, at the extreme low-end like the V140 or the Atom netbooks, that a SSD actually produced measurable increases in CPU performance. Not only do you have iowait which generally doesn't count as "idle" time according to linux (and probably windows) cpu utilization metrics, but even if you account for iowait, swapping off for another task while you iowait likely does have a performance hit in terms of caches that are no longer hot and so on, so performance is likely diminished when you come back to it too. And with no SMT, and only a single thread, context switching does become comparatively much more expensive in that fashion.