The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times
I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere and I saw the opposite on a eeepc by about half a minute when I put a newer distro with systemd on it. Is there any proof or are the faster boot times just on the wish list?
It has been significantly faster for me. Anyway the reason is that it can run multiple scripts at the same time which sysv couln't (though upstart did something similar).
And you also likely boot from an SSD, right?
I can boot "soon to be ancient" Windoze 7 on an old Core2 Duo HP laptop in 2GB of RAM to the login GUI in less than 10 seconds from a SSD. Fast enough I would say for a bloated operating system like Windoze.
No, I was mostly refering to my old laptop which has an old spinning disk, and boot time went from a minute to under a half. On my workstation with an SSD, it went from 10 seconds, to well, i guess 2 or 3, practically instantanious.