Currently the .7.1b1 installer seems to load considerably slower than the one in 7.0 I measured 8 minutes just to get the graphical mode installer loaded on my laptop with 12x CD-ROM, my celeron 466/24x DVD took an "only-slightly-annoying" amount of time. Oh well, I suppose text-mode installs would be ok even on slightly older hardware, but that doesn't mean the graphical one should be bloated ;) A related enhancement request for the installer would be some sort of "Please wait..." type message when testing the X server (which the installer needs to load and install from the CD), the operation seemed "long enough" for one. Once the installer was up and running there didn't seem to be any noticeable performance problems with it.
Seems to be caused by the drives in both machines not reading CD-RW's nearly as fast as normal CD-R's/CD-ROM's (in the case of the laptop, at 150k/s) I assume the requirement for the "Please wait..." would go away too if the X server was read from the CD at a reasonable speed :)