No, I am using a pretty beefy iMac. It’s not start time that I am concerned about, I tend to keep it open for a long time. It’s the mushy feeling when typing, or when some relatively “heavy” commands (projectile, search etc.) blocks the whole thing for a brief moment. It’s totally useable, but you can really tell the difference when compare it to other mainstream editors.
The one thing I've noticed that really helps with load times is running emacs as a daemon on startup and launching new instances with ```emacsclient -nc```. But that doesn't address issues while it runs.