One thing I hate with my Mac is the window dressing they do, they show the screen as it was before it's actually usable to give an impression of faster resume than it really has.
It's good as an interface, I think, because the human also requires some startup time -- if you can see what the screen looks like before it is interactive, you can orient yourself while the machine finishes reactivating.
Indeed it's a very good thing, especially if the actual resume can happen in that time span.
Sometimes it's frustrating since it looks like frozen.
Sometimes it's misleading, e.g. when you see that you didn't get an email or a IM notification, and then you realize it's because your e-mail/IM app is not really running yet.
Or when you take a quick glance to the wifi indicator and see that there are many bars and then you go away assuming there is connectivity but when it actually awakes you are not really online.
Microsoft faked the startup speed beginning with WinXP too. In Windows 2000 it took a long time to see the desktop. To speed it up in WinXP they show the desktop quit early but several startup-processes are still running with higher priority. So you had to wait til the hour-class was gone and the UI reacted to mouse clicks. Well the same was true for earlier MacOS X like 10.4 Tiger were you could watch and wait the spinning ball.
Nowadays with multi-core CPUs and SSD you won't notice such effects.
Systemd on Linux now does the same thing. On an SSD, it is really fast. On an older hard drive with slow seek times, you get a bit of thrashing which causes the overall boot time to be a tad bit slower in some cases.
Hate? I like this feature for 2 reasons: the clock shows the time at which the computer suspended (gives me an indication of how many hours I've been asleep on the keyboard :)) and if I was reading something, I can keep reading it while the OS loads.
