"In addition I have no information as to the long-term durability of these drives. In general, SSD drives should be long lasting, but there is no substitute for real world information as these drives are fairly new to the market."

It depends on memory cells used. Write cycle life ("write endurance") of cells varies from 30,000 cycles to 300,000.
SSDs use wear leveling algorithms that enhance the drive lifespan (some SSDs claim 1-5,000,000 write cycle life). All in all, SSD lifespan can be about the same of a standard hard disk (about or over 5 years).
Drive usage obviously enhances or reduces those figures; a system drive, where caches, swap files and logs are continuously written will have a shorter life than a data drive.

The worst problem is data recoverability: recovering data from a faulty SSD drive will be from really difficult to impossible, due to its intrinsic nature, and definitely a lot more costly than an HDD recovery (if sent to data recovery services). Next generation SSD drives promise to embed electronics and firmware to allow better recovery of data, similar to HDD, but current generation is a pain in the ass.