Yahoo did a study a while back and found that ~50% of their visitors had a cold cache http://yuiblog.com/blog/2007/01/04/performance-research-part...
They serve the actual tweet as "Cache-Control: no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate, pre-check=0, post-check=0"
EDIT: Just to check, I also looked at one of their css resources. https://si0.twimg.com/a/1330626450/t1/css/t1_core_logged_out...
Cache-Control: private, max-age=31449600
So I'm not confident Twitter actually understands how to set things.
PS: Hey Twitter, I can help =)
For the CSS file, some browsers are buggy so it really should be set to "Cache-Control: public".
See http://www.acunote.com/blog/2008/07/why-you-should-use-cache...
Apparently Stack Overflow sees similar numbers.