People further up are citing this as ~9kb ungzipped. To me 9kb vs 54kb ungzipped is more than a "slight" difference. It tips it over the threshold where you can just embed it rather than force a separate call. Seems like it would be idea for optimising the "first hit" when a user comes to your site and has nothing cached.
But if you're going to argue over 5KB perhaps you shouldn't be using JavaScript or CSS. If bandwidth matters that much, plaintext should keep the punters happiest.
