nabob21 - I don't know how helpful this will be to you, but I am working one of Vladimir's tutorials (really, nothing to do with Object size but I just happened to try it out there) - tutorial number 25 Clouds & Fog. 

Here, Vladimir is talking about changing the material of a cloud and he goes into the Function Editor about a third of the way through the tutorial.  When he highlights the Basic Repeater Fractal Node, I notice that he has his object size set to the default 10 m.

If you follow along and set your Object Size at this point to 1 m, you will lose all the spots on the display of the fractal node in the bottom left corner of the Function Editor. 

Now, if you insert a 0 in the Scale and Amplitude dimensions so that they read 0.085526 and 0.041623, respectively, you get the spots back, i.e. you've allowed for the change in Object Size.

I just felt that (to me) this was a good example to show me how the difference makes itself known.