That's pretty neat. Most Lion users I know have been complaining about poor boot times. My own machine takes 45-50 seconds to boot. I don't have a SSD, but in the Leopard days it used to boot from this same hard disk in about 20 seconds.
Lion has also cut battery life in half for a minority of users, and my own machine refused to go to sleep until -- get this -- I turned off Internet Sharing in the Sharing preferences.
Machine off, cold start to login screen: 6.7s
At desktop clicking restart to login screen: 5.9s.
Wake from sleep to login screen: 3.2s
Lift lid to login screen: 2.8s.
Same numbers here on my macbook pro. Another important stat is that when our laptops wake up, we re-establish wifi connections in ~100 ms, compared to the average of 10 seconds on PCs.
Asking for a citation is fair but he did say average and most folks on HN do not use average computers. My guess is that you have an above average machine.
Maybe, but apple only make 'premium' laptops (especially since killing the macbook), not comparable to an 'average' (read: a few years old, fairly budget) laptop.
The video is showing beyond the login screen with the laptop ready to use. So you need to measure from the login screen to desktop and add that to the 6.7s. Or set up autologin(if that can be done).
Lion has also cut battery life in half for a minority of users, and my own machine refused to go to sleep until -- get this -- I turned off Internet Sharing in the Sharing preferences.