If you like Apple Machintosh computers like I do, and you have recently purchased a MacBook Pro you'd also be frustrated at the increased delay (20-30 seconds) when trying to sleep the notebook.
My G4 usually went to bed in 2 seconds. Since I very regularly need to take my notebook with me to meetings and clients, I use sleep intensively.
The reason for the increased delay is NOT due to the Intel architecture. It has everything to do with a feature called SafeSleep. The idea is basically to save a snapshot of RAM just before sleeping, but instead of turning off the notebook it goes to sleep. If you turn it back on before the battery goes out, it will resume from volatile memory. Otherwise, if it dies due to battery running out then when turning it back on, it will resume from the saved RAM image - just like hibernate in the Windows world.
In my scenario, my notebook is never suspended for longer than a couple of hours. This means the likelyhood that the battery will run out whilst suspended is very close to 0.
So I did the following to reset the system to the behaviour prior to MacBook Pro's and whichever vesion of Mac OS X that introduced this feature:
sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0 sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage # Optional but reclaims disk space