@spectrewing: to be fair, Windows 7's Wi-fi reconnect time is quite long; when I take my wife's Win7 laptop out of standby, it takes a little while to restore network access: scanning networks, then once connected, browsing, can take a few seconds. On the other hand, my Ubuntu-powered netbook happily tells me "connected" by the time the screen lights up - which is only a quarter of a second after the disk restarted spinning.
To sum up, my wife's laptop requires something like a third of a minute between opening the lid and its restored state, while the netbook is ready to go under a dozen seconds.
I should try and see if Windows XP wasn't snappier, by any chance... As such, it could have been a regression dating back to Vista.