Laptop hard drive speeds

I am in the market for a new laptop (like many people here) and while I'm not ready to get one quite yet I have been looking around and reading up on what to look for.

One thing I have noticed from many companies is that the "gaming" laptops come with 5400 speed hard drives by default. I had thought that these had gone out of style long ago except in ultraportables and lower end systems. I would like to know what you guys all say about them. Specificly, with a large amount of RAM availible, does the hd speed really matter anymore? It has a larger amount of cache, but it is also trying to cache more data, so i would assume that the HD is still very active in gaming. What are the performance differences between identical systems with a 5400 and a 7200 HD?

Yes, worth it. You might lose some storage, but the speed increase is worth it if you are serious about going that route. I had a 5400rpm drive in my Inspirion 9300, then got a 7200rpm 8mb cache drive...it was like night and day the first time I booted up and used it (of course, after I installed XP).

It does help, but you might only really notice on boot times and loading games.