A friend of mine who got on the featured users list and went from 10,000 followers to 1,000,000 followers said it was like nothing changed. The number of @replies and RTs didn't increase noticeably at all.
The OP is correct. http://mashable.com/2010/03/10/twitter-follow-stats/
Can you substantiate this in any way? This doesn't match my experiences using twitter at all.