> > Also, have you read what I've just posted?
> 
> About the fuzziness of when startup is finished?  As implied above,
> I'd say at the end of Py_Initialize().

You only have imported a handful of modules by then. Real-world
applications will import many more afterwards.
Here's a little experiment (done with a system install of Python 2.7):

$ python -v -c pass 2>&1 | grep "^import" | wc -l
33
$ python -v `which hg` 2>&1 | grep "^import" | wc -l
117

Note that Mercurial has a lazy importer in order to improve startup
time, otherwise the number would be higher yet.