At the risk of sounding overtly geeky, here's what my boot process in Ubuntu looks like (click to show full size):

There's nothing special in the content itself (apart from my boot time of 30 seconds - woohoo!). What's special is
Bootchart - a software that traps and records all boot processes, and creates a lovely chart that you can analyze your boot process with. My guess is that it would be a boon to developers. Yes, the same can be obtained through a boot log - but as they say - a picture is worth a thousand words. This chart can help in determining that are increasing startup time and hogging memory, etc. The program was created in response to
this challenge:
"The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization."
I wonder if any similar utilities exist in Windows. If you know of any, do let me know.