So, vacation is over and I was in luck: Already during first week I had ample time to finally put Galera replication to the test. It was a great experience: I learned a lot, and eventually got the great results I was hoping to see.
Again I've started by just running the standard Sysbench oltp read-write test. Since this is a commonly used benchmark, it produces numbers that are comparable with others running the same benchmarks. Including, as it happens, Galera developers themselves.
These tests were run on an 8 core server with 32 GB of RAM and the disk on some EMC device with a 2,5GB write cache.