This dovetails with another Jobs story -

> After the iPad launch, Jobs supposedly walked into a meeting with the Mac team, carrying an iPad. He woke up the iPad, which happened instantaneously. Then he woke up a Mac, which took a while to come out of sleep. Then he asked something like, “Why doesn't this do that?

Without the iPad there to show it was possible there would have been arguments about memory speed and disk speed etc. And faster Mac sleep/wake put pressure on Windows to up their game.