First, thank you to everyone who read and also posted a comment! I think I could probably frame it a bit better now, but I have an older article that starts to address the "why" at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/awarren/usinguniqueindentifierinsteadofidentity.asp.

As to performance, it may seem sacrilegious, but not every decision you make has to be designed to get the absolute best performance. You have to look at the whole picture and the cost. Ten years ago, most people would have considered you out of your mind if you said you were going to use 3000 minutes on a cell phone each month, or turn off your land line for a cell phone. Since then the economics have changed. The same is true for the PC industry, CPU speed is fantasic, storage costs are down, storage access times are down, memory if not cheap at least affordable, and the ability to use more than 4-8g of memory is finally here. It's possible to bog down even the best hardware of course, but I'll argue that in most circumstances modern hardware masks any performance hit from using guids to the point that it rarely matters.