I believe it had been suggested in the past to delay the update check, so that people didn't have to do the manual edit. It used to be really early now I think it is around the 30 seconds, but without specialist software it would be hard to get the exact time.
A lot really depends on how many people suffer during boot, when you are looking at 200+ million users to shove it back for everyone. Personally I feel it should be an option in the User Interface to delay it by 3-5 minutes avoiding having to do a manual edit of the ini file.