Let the hive mind of Engadget get that for you.
"We need a digital camera that can be switched on and fire off that first shot fast. It's not a commonly tracked statistic on any review site, and nobody seems to have this information for every camera. We were hoping other readers could inform us as to what small digital cameras can fire off their first pics in under a second (ideally under half a second). It needs to be small, but mostly, just really quick in operation. Thanks!"
I don't know if anyone else mentioned this because I couldn't be bothered to read all the posts; but I take issue with your line "If you ask us, anything over a solid dozen million pixels is overkill and just asking for noise trouble and processing lag, so in fact chopping a third off the A850's pixels could turn out to be quite a boon for overall image quality" As the a850 is Full Frame it has around the same pixel density as the a700 at 12mpx so noise issues should be comparable. Further; some people want more pixels in order to make larger prints, Sony is bringing their fight to the door of medium format here.