The 'trick' to the boot time is to reboot as little as possible, and use the power saving features offered; once it loads, it'll swap out most of the things you're never going to use in daily life, at which point it's almost like having a computer.
Said features usually work right under 10 -- you'd kind of hope they would, what with the very small array of hardware involved -- but you'll occasionally hear a horror story. (Of course, that mystery problem with the Maxtor drives, which may or may not actually exist or be solved by now, apparently didn't rely on power saving actually being *enabled,* so..) Also realize that, while 'stable' and 'BSD-based' and so on, important parts of the system are proprietary code, and the rest hasn't been shaken down quite as far as the more popular projects, so your risk of panic does possibly increase as uptime accrues.
(This is far more likely to be a problem with weird hardware and flaky video drivers, but rebooting before you embark on any horribly important deadline-pressed work might not be a bad habit to make. Just in case.)
