If I may bring some balance to the issue...
What you supercharger aficionados are forgetting in your bliss of throttle response is the engine HP you are "losing" to spin the blower (or however you want to calculate it - you need to make more HP to generate the same HP that a turbo would generate). The beautiful thing about using exhaust gases is that they are mostly "free".
Properly sized turbos for the engine do just fine. It may feel like things are sluggish "down low" but the engine is still making power. Those of us who like them have learned to understand and deal with the lag and drive around it (sometimes it can even be helpful). Lag is hardly noticeable on a race track (my frame of reference). I haven't autocrossed in a while but I don't think you bog the engine down that low in the RPM range such that you are not in the sweet spot to get the boost when you open the throttle.
In any event, you have to make a compromise somewhere, even with a supercharger or with an N/A engine. Which compromise you make and how you deal with seems to divide up the "camps" on the issue. I acknowledge that there are some advantages to a supercharger but I'd rather be able to buy an inexpensive turbo as a replacement instead of a much more expensive blower and not have to deal with an extra belt or belt routing (plus it _seems_ to be easier to DIY turbocharge than supercharge).
If turbos are so bad, why hasn't Porsche ditched them and run superchargers? They use variable nozzle geometry (at last ECU's are advanced enough to be able to deal with the control system) in the latest iteration of the 911 and it seems to work just fine for them.
I saw this a while ago and have been waiting for just the right opportunity to use this line:
Turbocharged cars don't have turbo lag, it's just foreplay.
Regards,
--Ashraf (owner of two turbocharged Mazdas, one currently with twin turbos and a couple of different sized turbos lying around at home to play with in the near future)
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