I can appreciate inkscape as a tool, but I always dread starting it, because it somehow takes 10 seconds to start up. What is it doing in those 10 seconds?
That is definitely abnormal. For me (on an i5-3350P (!) Linux junk desktop from Hell) it starts up in about one second, so eomething is definitely wrong (or you're using an even worse machine than I am, in which case something _else_ is definitely wrong). Maybe one of the Inkscape support channels could help you here?
I'm on a athlon x4 860k at the moment, which according to benchmarks is marginally slower than your CPU.
Startup times certainly seem to be CPU bound, it pins one core to 100% during startup. This means they somehow are spending something to the tune of 1e10 cpu cycles to start a vector editor.
When inkscape is started up they use around 70 mb of ram. If they just store everything they need in ram in a linear file and load that at startup, the program would launch in a fraction of a second on an SSD.