Not to much has actually changed with the technology, more so the understanding of it. Yes with a ton of read/writes it will degrade the life of an SSD drive. Which is why you need to make sure some settings on your PC are turned off. (Specifically defrag) However not so much that it'll kill your computer within the lifetime of its use. Even if it dies 3-5 years from now, there will be better SSDs on the market for a lot cheaper than you purchased your SSD.
Personally I've got a 256gb SSD as my OS drive. I couldn't see going back to a platter drive for my operating system, and the handful of programs I have running of it. Running programs, starting up the computer, everything just goes by very quickly compared to a platter drive. The best thing you can give your computer to upgrade how quickly it responds to what you want to do is by installing an SSD.
If you haven't taken the plunge in purchasing an SSD drive. By all means do so now! There are tons of great drives out there for fairly reasonable prices. You should have no excuse as to why you haven't upgraded yet.