What worries me, is that most of the feeling is just placebo. I know native is faster, but by how much? Are there any good benchmarks for measuring emacs speed?

    (run-with-idle-timer
     3 nil
     (lambda ()
       (let ((inhibit-message t))
         (message "Emacs ready in %s with %d garbage collections."
                  (format "%.2f seconds"
                          (float-time
                           (time-subtract after-init-time before-init-time)))
                  gcs-done))))

That said, I'll play with it some. Still looking for a broader benchmark, though.

Edit: Looks like I lied. Startup is about 2 seconds, but is mainly dominated by a network hit to refresh packages. (So, slower if I'm on a bad network... I should fix that.) Your script, though, is odd, as I can get to the Messages buffer and wait a second before I see that message show up. (Also, you can just eval (emacs-init-time))

An emacs -q startup is roughly the same. And I maintain that many things feel snappier with the optimization flags.

Back to the point, though, I'm assuming that libc dynamically does most of the optimizations that native enables?