I like it the way it is (without startup banner). It makes it feel more like the Palm UI: Just start.. no noise..

The only immediate problem, or inconvenience I see is that the icons seem to take up a lot of space side-wise, so to have more than three or four apps. configured I ran into trouble making enough room (the Hildon UI and the non-flexibility of some of the applets shows up here). Only I fear that the reason the icons take so much room is that they actually have a lot of white space in them so it's not just a matter of squeezing them more together, is it?