ML experience on 2009 iMac?

A number of reports I'm reading say that ML is a much better OS than Lion, runs smoother, etc. I'm still on SL and refrained from upgrading to Lion because I read that it was slower, and having a slightly older machine my guess was that it would run even slower on mine. I'm running a late-2009 iMac, 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Processor, 16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM. Even though Apple says my machine is compatible, I'm wondering how well ML would actually run on my machine? Does anybody here have similar specs that could shed some light on their ML experience? How is ML compared to SL?

I'm inclined to simply keep running on SL (if it ain't broke, don't fix it) but am also intrigued by ML and also realize that with Apple I will inevitably have to upgrade to access their new features (even though I wouldn't be able to use AirPlay with my machine, ggrrrr).