Hey there,
hereby starting the next "what services are really needed" flamewar ;).
No, really, have a look at that bootchart:
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel_moblin_2&num=2
They claim that their netbook boots in 7-8s with moblin alpha.
Ok, they start xfce instead of gnome/kde but just think of booting that
thing into gdm. This would already completely exceed the 10s startup
feature of fedora 12.
And look at what they start: udev, hal, dbus, all those things that tend
to slow down boot are there (well, no sendmail daemon).
So how can they do that?