Heck, I've been trolling for a decent 128GB IDE SSD for my older laptop for the past year. Sure the laptop is getting close to 5 years old now, but it's now the only 32 bit machine left in my test environment. Aside from the disk it's still decently fast, an SSD is all it needs...

Transcend makes a lot of products for industrial applications, there is plenty of high end equipment out there that uses an IDE interface and would benefit durability of SSD. It the same reason there is still a market for laptops with serial ports, you don't replace multi million dollar production or testing equipement every three years like you do you office PCs, you buy PC hardware that's compatible with it instead.

"What surprises me is that Transcend is releasing new IDE models..."

This doesn't really surprise me. Transcend have spotted a niche market, providing a performance upgrade to older, non-SATA laptops.

As long as they don't take the piss on pricing, I suspect they're onto a winner.