You're talking about cold start, right? Warm start (at least on my box) is very fast. (not that I disagree that cold start needs a lot of work. Hopefully Prism and jdk7's modules will help with that).
yes, cold start or running a different applet is about 7 seconds on a modern windows vista laptop.
From the console output it just looks like its doing tons of stuff before starting.
Refreshing the same applet is pretty quick though.
However, running a javafx applet for the first time where (javafx 1.3 is not installed) is a pretty horrid experience. Sudden browser freeze and/or cpu and hd activity going to maximum and can last up to a minute without even telling you whats going on.
My main issue with this isn't the length of time but lack of visual feedback and sudden mass of computer activity making everything unresponsive.
I'd be pretty happy to wait up to a minute if a nice loading screen was shown in the applet while javafx was being installed however, the system should remain responsive so that I can for example continue surfing in another tab. Again same thing applies to cold start up.
But really startup time needs to be less then a second to really compete with the competition.