Related self-promotion: I built pgtemp (https://github.com/boustrophedon/pgtemp) to automate doing exactly these mkdir/initdb/load/destroy steps.
That looks fantastic, so I'm actually just going to put a link to it in the post so that more people see it.
It's well maintained and seems to do what it says on the tin. I start it up once across all the suites (managing DB state as required in the suite) and the overhead is very minimal.