Perhaps full desktop in under 10 seconds is a bit overly optimistic, but the alpha of 9.10 currently boots (for me) from grub->desktop in 15 seconds flat on my T400s with SSD -- and that 15 seconds includes the time it takes me to type my password! Yep, 15 seconds, and yea, that's "usable" (icons all there, taskbars, heck, even networkmanager is trying to connect to the wifi networks at that point).

So 10 seconds isn't all that far out of reach... they still have >6 months till 10.04 ...

Reaching login screen in 10 seconds? Done that :)

Of course they do... you're not doing Linux (or FOSS in general) any favours by buying a throwaway MS license with your hardware...

I think this is an important fact that cannot be ignored... sure, Microsoft got a (license) sale out of it, but I know a few people now that have purchased one with XP as a "good to have" and then blew the partition away and installed Ubuntu instead. I'm sure they're in the overall minority, but...

A friend of mine just got his shiny Acer Aspire this weekend (with XP, of course) and spent a couple of hours getting Ubuntu up and running how he likes it... why did he buy XP? "you never know when you'll need to run Windows software".

Guess its the same reason why my Ubuntu-powered Thinkpad still has the Vista license sticker underneath... score one sale for MS.