That is very neat! I always thought about expanding that idea to most programming languages. Most of the startup time is probably spend stating and reading files.

Just from a quick experiment

    time python -c ''; time python -S -c ''

    real	0m0.079s
    user	0m0.021s
    sys 	0m0.030s

    real	0m0.017s
    user	0m0.007s
    sys 	0m0.007s

From the manpage:

    -S     Disable the import of the module site and the site-dependent manipulations of sys.path that it entails.

I also considered doing the same thing for a linux distro. Just out of pure curiousity to what would happen to the boot up times. Wish I could have time to try it one day :(