Yeah, I am guessing you never actually tried to get any work done on one. Nothing like listening to it swap on the floptical while doing a big compile. CHUNKA-CHUNKA-CHUNKA...CHUNKA-CHUNKA.
I actually had a lab full of them. I said they were cool, not fast. :-)
Most everyone I knew who had one added a SCSI hard drive real quick to their NeXT cube and moved stuff like swap there, and eventually folks figured out how to replace the optical as the boot drive. If you were desperate, you could swap to NFS which while not much faster was usually smoother (and quieter) than swapping to the optical.
