After reading some comments about how Spotlight just works for other people, and talking with some friends that have Spotlight turned on, I started doubting that it was so bad. It turns out that when I got the MacBook Pro, I transfered about 40 GB of stuff from my old laptop, and apparently it also transfered a corrupt Spotlight Index.

So after running:

# mdutil -E /

and turning Spotlight back on, I’m no longer seeing the performance problems I had. All thanks to the comments. And I didn’t think anybody read this blog :)