Are you actively using other windows while in the process of launching a new one? It's not like the start screen stays there forever, or the window you were looking at goes away. There are a lot of nit-picking curmudgeons in this thread.

Often, yes. I might be watching a video and using muscle memory to go Start -> "gv" -> Enter to start up gvim for another window, for example.

It's not nit-picking when the decision is a bad one.

I'd tend to agree, though I think it's far more painful if you're in a VM with bad video perf versus a native machine with a good video card.

Yes. I'm reading the filename of a document in Gmail and typing it into search to quickly call it up.