Ad blockers can dramatically speed up your connection, especially against annoying video, flash, and big graphics/animations. For many webpages, the ads are the biggest thing on the page.If you want the fastest-starting, quickest page-loading ... web browser in the world ... [and] don’t want to mess with complicated features like ad blockers...
Also, I think the suggestion that all users care about is speed is true but not the whole picture. There are a number of manufactures that make phones cheaper and faster than Apple, but it's the interface and features can sell the phone. In the browser space, Firefox took the speed crown from both Chrome and IE many moons ago but doesn't appear to have drastically impacted their usershare.
Amusingly, the first comment to the post about Nitro back in January was asking for an adblock plugin to which Maxthon said "coming soon!"
http://www.maxthon.com/blog/the-latest- ... available/
Anyway, interesting stuff either way. Thanks Midas.