Interesting article, although I do have to wonder exactly how fast people really need websites to load up. I rarely find myself waiting for a site to render, more often net traffic will make the rendering speed completely moot.
I'd also like to see this thing against Firefox 3, which I have been using for the last 4 weeks or so. Beta 3 is very strong, quick, retains all the functionality FF is famous for, and integrates (at least visually) very nicely into Leopard. Incidentally, FF 3 will work perfectly well with Tiger. It's a little concerning to see such a recent OS get left behind.
What's made it so hard for me to give up Firefox, is the idea that with Mozilla, you're part of a greater community. 17% of all net users are Gecko users, compared to barely 7% using Webkit. The payoff of course is that compatibility is often greater.
I do like Safari and still use it for about 25% of my browsing, but in the days of machines now having 2 gigs of memory and 2ghz Dual Core processors pretty much as standard, having a small footprint and maxing out rendering speed, are not my primary concerns. I would say 90% of the websites I visit load in less than a second on any browser I use. Getting them up in 300 msecs as opposed to 500 msecs isn't something I am going to sweat over.