I switched to baselayout-1.11.6 for my embedded configurations and the net.X scripts are very slow to start. It's almost immediate with a 1.5 GHz, but it takes about 18 seconds on a 133 MHz. The old network scripts were working fine (immediate load). I reproduced this using the ifconfig and iproute2-style configurations, even with very simple and static network configs. I'll try to investigate this a little more, but if someone already has an idea where the system uses so much time, please followup here.
Koon - this has vastly improved in our current CVS (gentoo-src module) I'll pester agriffis to see if we can roll an updated version
1.11.7 is out