fun, but generally irrelevent

I disagree, In my case, serving gz encoded HTML saved me about $100 a month. For smaller or less active sites it could be somewhat irrelevant as far as costs go but still, the user gets the HTML page faster, which is not bad, and the HTTPD process finishes faster, which is good for the server.

we give clients 50Mb ...

That would be enought for about 10 of my apache logfiles (compressed).

Tiago