Canonical’s Scott James Remnant relayed in an email how the team wishes to get a 10 sec boot time out for the ever popular linux distibution. The hope to have the whole up and running with disk and chipset at a ready state in 10 seconds. The team has pulled off miracles before (making Linux popular in the first place) and will be working hard to get this achievement done by 2010. The details and breakdown of how they will accomplish this full bodied boot time is below.
From the email:
“2s Kernel and initramfs.

This includes both, since arguably the need for an initramfs is a
kernel implementation detail anyway (the kernel can mount the root
filesystem itself in many circumstances)

2s Plumbing

This is for driver loading, filesystem mounting, general busy
work, etc.

2s X.org server

Includes the display manager that actually starts it. Also
includes any services required for the user’s session that can be
started alongside the X server

4s Desktop session

Everything from the window manager, file manager to the panel and
its applets. Also includes any services they require.”

He also goes on to mention the Dell Mini 10V netbook as part of the achievable goal.

"sharp-eyed readers will know this has just been end-of-lifed; we
    have yet to decide whether to change the platform as a result - a
    possibility is to use the Dell Mini 10v which should give
    near-identical results, but we haven't verified that yet."

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