The intel drives have been on the market the longest, they are currently 2nd Gen (G2) and you know for certain it supports TRIM (required Win7 for native TRIM support). Many of the SSDs on the market do not support TRIM.
The PCMark score is handy, but mostly useless. What do those numbers mean to you? Its like comparing car engines and deciding to choose the car& engine that has the highest RPMs... but how fast can the car actually go? Real-world time is what counts.
The intel drives are NOT the fastest... but the TRIM, tools, reliability, price and Random performance puts it on the top of my list. The OWC mercury 50~100GB drives are promising... very high Random R/W... but where do you buy these? How much are they? newegg, tiger direct... none. And OCZs are also in the same boat, most Etailers have the lower end models in stock... TRIM is questionable.
But looking at this:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2948/2 intel has very slow Sequential writes, but its READs are near the top again.
At 80GB, its nowhere near as expensive as the 120~160GB drives on the market. You do need to plug in the drive and confirm its "BIOS" Firmware version... PC-Wizard will tell you without installing drivers. before formating ans using the intel drives..
1 - Make sure you load the latest FIRMWARE (CD-R required, takes about 1-2 minutes)
2 - Turn on AHCI (not helpful with HDs, but SSDs - its a good idea, recommended)
3 - Install the OS and your APPs. Turn off indexing and then System restore once you have done the updates and the system is running good.
On my desktop, my Win7 partition is about 50GB in size. With the OS and ALL my apps, the space used it 12GB. When I made my backup mirror image of the partition, its under 5GB compressed. All my games and data files sit on a another partition. I don't have an SSD yet... $$$$. But I love using notebooks and desktops that do have them.
The last Intel SSD I bought were $300 and $290(OEM), 6+ weeks ago. Then I bought an off-brand version of the intel (same exact drive) for $240 - doesn't include the 3.5 adapter... but I used one from the retail intel-intel box. $225 is an excellent deal. About a year from now, an 80GB G3 should be about $123~150