Yeah, Windows 7 can boot somewhat quickly if given the right environment. It's around 20 seconds in an ESXi VM at work where it has very little to wait on, and still catches me off guard to how fast it is.

I did find the recent article about UEFI from the BBC amusing. They act as if UEFI is some new magic bullet, when in reality it's been around for ages. PC vendors have just been slow to adopt it. What seems to be driving it now is the push to break the 2TB storage limit of MBR. Seagate has 3TB drives ready, but they won't work unless a system can boot off a GUID partitioned disk. Anyhow, it will be nice to see UEFI boot systems subtract a bit more time off the boot sequence.