I’ll answer this just with my experience and little knowledge.
I think it applies on both nVidia CUDA & ATi Stream.
With my experience with nVidia (GTX260) (Badaboom Video Converter), it converts faster than ordinary conversion done by CPU, about 40% without losing video quality.
As for Vegas, maybe if you render a video (depending on the plug-ins you applied) through GPU, it might cut rendering times a bit (from 1hr down to 35-50mins)
That’s all I know.