Overall I agree with you, but usability and user interface don't do anything for someone who doesn't even consider using Ubuntu. Boot time is one of those things that, if you get it beyond a certain threshold of speed, can really jump out and grab someone's attention. For those people who power down their computers and start them up again for whatever reason, it'll be extremely noticeable every single time, both when they start up their own 10.04 machines, and when they go to non-10.04 machines that start up way more slowly. This seems like one of those things that will serve a specific group of people very very well, and doesn't hurt for everyone else. As long as they're not sacrificing too much effort for this, it seems like it could be a good use of effort.
In the land of laptops, powering down is a lot less frequent. Vista's "power button" by default suspends. The hardware power button suspends. I suspect a lot of Windows users almost never reboot.
it's truer in osx. i never booted my iBookG4 except for updates.
the more important is the sleeping wake up time. in mac, you can just close it, travel half the world, open it and instantly everything works(tm) just like nothing happened
it seems ubuntu again is copying the wrong model. reboot is sooooo microsoftie, solving it is like premature optimization.
