I have found Launchy to be faster than the Start menu method. Also, Launchy learns from your behavior, so if you type [w][o] into Launchy and then select "Word", it will know in the future that [w][o] should bring up Word first.

I don't know for sure since, like you, this is basically how I open apps. But recently I was told from a friend of mine that you can also enter arguments with launchy. My friend had a link to a website and launchy would let him then enter some text which it would put what he typed into a parameter in the url. For example:

http://intranetsite/stores?id={0}

then entering "45" in launchy after selecting the url would let him go to the site for store 45.

There are plugins, one for example, so I can type putty[tab]servername. You can also index more locations than your start menu. I index a common shared documentation space, and can easily open files by typing their name.