I dunno, perhaps I'm just slow, but I know my emacs startup is certainly more than 2 seconds and the time has never bothered me. As I rarely hack on elisp these days, I don't find it necessary to restart very often and I've got everything integrated using emacsclient, so once I'm running, I forget about startup time. However, I will put some timing code in just to see (out of interest) what my startup is like.
For me, I'm more frustrated by modes like helm, which seem to offer benefits, but I find such add-ons tend to slow down my use of emacs, which I find more frustrating than startup times.
The slowest component in my setup is definitely me though!
Tim