I just received an email from CDATA, and they are claiming that certain types of queries using the REST API may be up to 3-5 times faster than Searches performed via SuiteTalk SOAP

I got this email too. Still uses their ODBC product

exactly. Also not sure how much I trust their statement. The performance of their SSIS driver was abysmal for us, so even at 5 times the speed, it would still have been way too slow.