See now, here is the difference. I am not using aperture. I dont know of many professionals that are. A lot of people on this forum will say they are, but hey...look at the crowd...this is MACrumors.com.... not adoberumors.com. When it comes down to processing RAW files, it is almost completely CPU based. It has nothing to do with display or graphics...now rendering previews is a different story.
I was not completely disagreeing with you, nor was I saying that the mac mini is just as powerful as the imac. I was simply stating that an SSD will not make up for a slow CPU and RAM will only help so much. It may eliminate the bottle neck of the hard drive, but I know that in my workflow (and many other photographers) that the hours that I spend in batch processing can be cut quite a bit by having a better CPU.
A quick program launch will do very little for me in terms of speeding up my workflow.
I do agree with you, and I am not trying to prove you wrong, just emphasizing that CPU speed does make a difference in certain tasks.
Right now, i am not really looking at SSDs in my workflow as they are so freaking expensive for such small amounts of storage.