John, I can't help you with your decision to buy a festool saw or not but am curious about some comments you made.
I think at one time or another we have all fallen in love with a new tool and over the past 35 years of buying tools for my shop I have had many such affairs. Some tools turned out to be fantastic buys and heavily used, while some tools never lived up to my expectations and sadly just sat around collecting dust.
What prompted me to write this is that in almost every post above you mentioned "segmenting" as one of the reasons you were looking at this saw. I have a nice Delta compound miter saw and to be honest, it is the LAST tool I would consider when doing any segmenting work for pens! Now it's not as pretty and shiny as the festool but NEITHER would be my choice for making detailed cuts.
Every tool has it's purpose AND it's limitations and this miter saws might be fine for making compound angled cuts in a 2x4 or accurate cuts in 6" crown molding using the double laser lines that will bring you to within 1/16" but unless you are a framing carpenter cutting rafters or a trim carpenter cutting crown molding and wood trim, I see little use around the shop for any intricate work.
I can only speak from my own experiences but when I want to make a blank where I use segments as thin as .020", I use the Incra Miter Express with my table saw. With this setup I can clamp a segment sliver .125" thick by 3" long and trim .002" off the edge before glueing. These are tolerences this tool is designed for and the festool saw or any miter saw would be totally useless with this type of work.
I'm sure you have other uses for the saw and as far as I know, you may just be a framing carpenter! I'd just hate to see you spend lots of money on a tool, thinking it's going to be the answer to your needs.
Just for grins, visit
http://www.incra.com/product_miter_express.htm then looking at the right side of the screen, scroll down to the third photo where they are describing the hold down clamp. Pretend this is a pen blank you just segmented and now want to fine tune the cut before glueing to another piece. Could you imagine trimming off .002" with the miter saw or changing the angle of the bevel by .003" instead of 1/2 degree?
But, in the end this does fall squarely into the category of.... "whatever floats your boat", so good luck with whatever you decide.