[anamax]

> I'm just a bit tired of people babbling on about software bloat when this pretty conclusively proves its the I/O subsystem that is the problem.

This proves nothing of the sort. (Office95 was bloated too....)

The time to boot is large because software is huge, scattered all over the disk, and has unnecessary dependencies.

It may be convenient to believe that everything fits in L1 cache, but doing so often results in slow programs. The same principle applies here. Some operations cost more than others. Software which uses slow operations will run slower than software that doesn't.

To put it another way, big O is the start, not the end.