i don't have an opinion on the larger fight here, but you have to disable pulseaudio if you want a fast startup in opensuse 12.1 (otherwise there's a 30s pause when the desktop starts). disabled, everything seems fine.
FWIW, my laptop, running Fedora, boots to the desktop in 15s total, with pulseaudio. I would sooner attribute that to a problem with the suse init system (every time I've dug into the suse init scripts, I've found horribly absurd decisions) than I would pulseaudio.