Unbelievable slow startup with OS 10.7 Lion

Question

The Problem
Out of curiosity I decided to time the amazing slow startup of Lion after several weeks of use.  It took a full minute from the chime sound until the welcome screen showed with the list of users.  Then, from the time I pressed the return key with my user password until the first app (iChat) was able to open any operational window, it took another full minute and 34 seconds.  If we include the 17 seconds that Lion took to let me click on my user and enter my password (because it doesn't matter how quick you do it, Lion is not going to take it anytime soon), we are talking about nearly three minutes from beginning to the end.
Clarification # 1
I'm not loaded with all those login items that tend to slow down the startup to load on the menu bar.  Nothing out of the normal (Dropbox, Evernote, unDock), the ones most seasoned Apple users use.  I have used Macs since 1989 and consider myself an Intermediate knowledge user, so don't tell me some of the things that I already know after 22 years.  I know this is not normal and wonder if everybody else using Lion has conformed to such slowness.
Clarification # 2
Another necesary clarification: I DO NOT check the option to "Reopen windows when logging back in".  Depending on the number of open apps or windows you have when shutting down or logging out, that can easily double or triple the startup waiting time!  What an annoying feature!  What was Apple thinking when checking that box by default?  Are they assuming that most of us want to wait more than 3 minutes to have our Mac up and running?  How many users are cursing Apple's engineers names for doing this everytime they shutdown or startup their Macs?
Clarification # 3
My hard drive is pretty much in order.  I use Drive Genius to keep my blocks in order with 150Gb (out of 500Gb) available and mostly in one single block to be available for virtual memory and temporary files.  So, hard drive slowness is not the problem.  As you can see, I've done my homework, including repairing permissions, etc.
Final reflexion
If Windows 8 is promising to have a 10-second startup (and beta tryouts confirm that it does so), maybe Apple should consider reviewing making me loose roughly over 15 hours every year waiting for my Mac to startup...

Answer 1

I have the new MacBook Pro with Lion pre-installed. I did a fresh install of CS4 and didn't have any problems with installation. I do fairly basic editing in Photoshop so I tested the following:
- Opening .jpg and .NEF (raw) files
- Opening several photos at once
- Editing a photo in the .NEF interface
- Creating new layers
- Flattening layers
- Adding text
- Rotating the image
- Cropping
- Changing saturation
- Applying unsharp mask
- Clone Stamp tool
- Applying the Liquify filter
- Selecting a color
- Using the eye dropper tool
- Paintbrush tool
- Burn tool
- Adjusting levels, curves, brightness, contrast
- Changing the image size
- Copying and pasting from one image to another
- Creating an Action
- Opening Adobe Bridge and performing a Batch operation using the Action I created
- Saving as .psd and .jpg
- Opening the files on another machine to see if the files seemed ok
I admit that this is not a thorough testing of the software, but I was able to accomplish these basic tasks on several photos I used. The only problem I experienced was when I tried dragging my Background layer onto the New Layer button. This caused the program to freeeze. When I pressed the New Layer button, it was fine. Considering this is about the only functions I ever use in Photoshop, I don't see a reason not to stick with this version. Obviously, I don't know if you would have problems doing more complicated things.