Unity has dynamic search &c and I find it takes a little time to build the Dash home lens.
Because the Gnome Shell 'Activities' overlay is not building a dynamic list, it seems to appear almost instantly.
Anyway I am really suprised by overall performance, apps start very fast and laptop has 4 sec suspend/3 sec wake up. (altough it often takes additional timea for wifi to reconnect again).
The Dash home lens is actually providing a lot of context by listing the recently used apps/modified files/and even the played music. I sometimes wonder how many people use that context!
The times for the app loading and suspend/resume is down to your hardware which is obviously fast with the ssd.