My current work machine came with bitlocker, and being an upgrade from the prior model. It only seemed faster to me. What I have found, however, is that bitlocker is more bullet proof than truecrypt, when it comes to accurately laying down the data. I do a lot of work in SAS which constantly writes backup copies to disk as it moves along and shoots a variety of output types to disk at the end. SAS works fine writing output from multithreaded processes back to bitlocker and doesn't seem to know it's there. This has not been the case for me with truecrypt. I'm not sure what happens or how, but I found that processes got out of synch when working with source/output data in a truecrypt container, which is what I installed on my second work computer since it had no bitlocker. The constant backups were shooting to an SSD while the truecrypt results were on a regular HD. Maybe that speed difference helped trip it up. Whatever the cause, I had to quit using truecrypt on that second computer because it made my SAS results out of synch with respect to processing order and it screwed up some of my processes and data. Scary stuff in my world.
I work with people who have successfully used Truecrypt on the exact same computer, but they weren't using a disk intensive app. like SAS.
Bitlocker to Go, the encryption which bitlocker applies to thumb-drives, does slow things down quite a bit when it comes to read/write times. It's not too hard to use as long as you remember your password on the thumbdrive, and are willing to wait for it to format/initialize the drive, but in my experience it made access to the flash drive about 4 times as slow. Don't know why it would slow down a thumb drive and not a disk but that's how it was for me and my coworker.
Based on my success with bitlocker at work, I bought Windows Pro for my home computer to get bitlocker and plan to encrypt some directories with it for things like financials.