The "Linux Times" has an article entitled One week with Gentoo Linux. It's conclusions (in part):
Gentoo is a one-of-a-kind distribution, simple yet powerful. The only drawback is that it can take very long to compile software (I would love to test Gentoo on a AMD64), but the results made me forget that.This is true enough, but after the inital "big ones" (gnome, kde, X, etc) on modern hardware it's really easy to get used to the time to emerge a package.