Certainly they're not meaningless on a SATA-150 controller. However many new motherboards have onboard SATA-300 support, and on one of these, the inclusion of an SATA-300 drive ...
I feel that one part of this review is critically flawed, and that is that you tested the reference drive with SATA-150 instead of SATA-300. This is an apples to oranges comparison.