Yes, that was one outcome for me as well. If a 2007 vintage netbook with its atom processor and mechanical drive can just about marginally run an up to date Firefox, then a core duo with discrete graphics card and a few Gig of ram should be screaming.
My detailed outcomes were more to do with skills; I have spent a week plus a few days extra in groff working with 6000 words of text, a few diagrams and half a dozen tables. So I have explored the classic pre-processors such as pic, eqn, tbl and grap. It has dawned on me that I can describe quite complex diagrams in grap/pic and then run them through groff to get ps files then convert those to eps, load into something like inkscape and export in a variety of formats.
In addition I have become a lot more fluid with vi. I'm *almost* thinking in vi now, but not quite.