No, it's not. I have a TI6x laptop, 4gb of RAM, plenty o' CPU and with no other user-space programs running, it still takes FOREVER to start. I feel like i'm launching Eclipse or something.

it is not a matter of hardware. On my ex-work desktop (2.8GHz quad core, so fairly quick) it used to take a good 5-10 seconds to be ready from a cold start. Yes, subsequent starts were faster, but it's a flipping shell, it shouldn't need hefty hardware to start quickly!

Absolutely. Even on my work machine (2.2GhZ, 4GB RAM) it loads within a second.

Yeah, I can also handily disagree with this. My test machine has a 6 month old CPU and 6GB of RAM. I can reboot, wait 5 minutes and try to launch PowerShell and still be looking at a 5-15 second wait.