There are two separate issues, I believe you refer to. There is the boot time, which has been considerably improved, and is less than a second. The second thing is the slight pause that you refer to (if I understand the post correctly), when executing stuff the first time. That is the JIT compiling and warming the code cache.
The startup time in 0.3 is more than 10x faster than 0.2 – it's down to ~200 ms on my machine, whereas it was about 2 seconds before. It's now quite painful to go back and use 0.2.