My startup had always been under a second. On a Mac, the command to get the path right is the longest pole. Remains so in native.

That said, I'll play with it some. Still looking for a broader benchmark, though.

Edit: Looks like I lied. Startup is about 2 seconds, but is mainly dominated by a network hit to refresh packages. (So, slower if I'm on a bad network... I should fix that.) Your script, though, is odd, as I can get to the Messages buffer and wait a second before I see that message show up. (Also, you can just eval (emacs-init-time))