Is there a performance benefit to placing transaction log files on a separate drive?
Correct. In theory, if you have 100s of DBs you need 100s of drives, one for each log. In practice though one does not care for such case, cause when you have 100s of DBs you obviously don't expect top-notch TPC performance for each DB. You will likely have some DBs with high throughput and stringent SLAs and you could have them each on separate spindles, while the many lower level SLAs cram on a few shared disks.