New 2013 Air or Current Pro W/Retina

Question

I am facing a terribly difficult decision. I am replacing a mid 2012 base model Pro without retina and 500gb disc drive. I was having pretty severe typing lag and if I ever accidently clicked on iPhoto or iMovie I would have to stare at the bouncing beach ball for a good 25-30 seconds before I could do anything else. A good friend of mine is a huge Air fan and he says that is because of my Pro having a traditional hard drive and if it had an SSD it wouldn't do that. So I have regretted my choice of the Pro over the Air for the past 10 months.
So 3 days ago I drove 6 hours in the car to the closest Best Buy and picked up a brand new 256gb 2013 Air. I still have not broken the seal.... the sales person made one comment to me that is eating at the back of my mind for days now. I was looking at the price and specs of the Macbook Pro with retina display 8gb ram, 128gb SSD. It was on sale right now for $1399 so it would have been $175 more than the 256gb Air model I was purchasing. I said ehhhhh its almost $200 dollars more and I am already way over budget and he says "Yes, but its 2x the machine the Air is and you would get the retina display."....
In the end I chose the Air mainly because of the Haswell improvements (mostly graphical imporovements because the battery life isn't really a concern to me) and mostly because with the Air I am getting 2x the SSD storage (256gb Air versus only 128gb on the Pro) and the new Air has the PCI based SDD which is supposed to be up to 45% faster than the SATA SDD that I am assuming the Pro uses?
SO my big question is did I make a big mistake? I mostly went with the Air for the PCI SSD so I don't have to stare at that bouncing ball every time I do anything and it seems like the Haswell Intel 5000 graphics should far outperform the Pro's Intel 4000. Retina display would be nice but not really a requirement. I didn't really have time to even look at the retina display model and to be honest the screen resolution on my base model Pro never bothered me at all and in the couple mintutes I was in the store I didn't see a huge difference between the two (although they were not side by side). Also I was thinking having to push that retina display for everything you do would actually be more taxing on the performance?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I am a casual user, mostly just web, email, listen to music, youtube videos and about 2x a year I like to iMovie together videos of my kids. Never leaves the kitchen table so portability and battery life is of no real concern although the Air is unbeliveably sexy IMO. Also I have never tried it before but I would very much like to be able to run Parralels occasionally to be able to run a few Windows programs I still rely on and I am tied of borrowing my daughter PC for that. Is parralels going to be better or worse on either machine?
Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

Having similar dillema, decided for Air. The main reason - I dont think that the old Intel graphics has enough power for retina, 2nd I like the 1440 res on 13´,  1280 is too little, anything more is too much (for me). Retina was tempting because of HDMI and 2 Thunderbolts not the display
Air was nice surprise, I "downgraded" from i7 quad that i hated because of weight and size, do not miss any speed, only video renderings take longer but not much otherwise it feels even faster and at half the weight.
2013 MBA is amazing machine.