A "hello world" Java program starts up fast, sure. But Clojure start-up time usually takes more than 1 second; it can be 10 seconds plus if you include many jars. I don't know whether that's more the fault of Clojure or the JVM.
I love clojure as a language, but my code is usually cli oriented and it was such a terrible fit for it that I switched to Scala. Despite being on the jvm, my startup times are an order of magnitude better.