Well,
I also just got a 13" and installed an Intel X25 drive (160gb) and then stumbled upon this thread. I've called Apple Care to get more information. Waiting to hear back.
In the meantime ran xbench on my machine so I could compare it to other machines and got a score of 198.91. The results for a base 2.53GHz, 4gb RAM, 250gb 5400 drive configuration was also out there on the xbench site and the results for that machine were 137.17. When looking at the read write speeds, with the SSD don't lose anything but on the read side the differences are very dramatic.
This does not answer the question about the limitations of SATA I vs SATA II but at least shows a dramatic increase in the score with the swap in hard drive.
I will update if I get more tech support info