I'll describe my experience if that might help anyone clear things up.
I targeted a pretty competitive keyword with 4,400 local monthly searches, exact match. I created the site solely for these links: emdXYZ-type of a domain registered the same day, wordpress, one page of content, around 400 words article, some proper links out, an RSS widget, an embedded video. All went into the system being 2 hours old. No other linkbuilding, not even a tweet to keep the experiment clean.
The initial blast was affected by the bug mentioned in the previous thread, so g1c9 re-run it. The complete blast took place around March 9th and there was an ahrefs spike right in the evening/on 10th.
Pretty much right after that I saw changes: on day 4 the site appeared on page7 and by now (it's been exactly 9 days) it's settled on page 3.
Link results:
"URL" in google - around 100K results
Links in ahrefs - around 36K
Linking domains in ahrefs - around 3K
Traffic: getting some longtails every day, nothing too serious though.
All in all it's a great service and I am satisfied with the results of this bare minimum experiment in a tough spam-dominated niche. Sure, page 3 is not much per se, but as a part of a bigger plan I am following, with other sites being pumped in completely different ways and the final money site taking all the juice later - I am pretty sure I will get good results.
/facts
speculation:
Another idea is to use this in a carefully researched not-so-spammy lower-cpc niche with weaker competition, where your site will just rape its way to page 1 from a single blast.