>> Прямая. Он ради неё и писался изначально.
> Нет

В смысле "Нет! Это было давно и поэтому почти неправда!"?
http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/systemd.html (2010 год)
> Rethinking PID 1

...
> As mentioned, the central responsibility of an init system is to bring up userspace. And a good init system does that fast.
> Unfortunately, the traditional SysV init system was not particularly fast.
> For a fast and efficient boot-up two things are crucial:

...
> if we manage to make those sockets available for connection earlier and only actually wait for that instead of the full
> daemon start-up, then we can speed up the entire boot and start more processes

...
> An easier way is to download this Fedora 13 qemu image, which has been prepared for systemd and hence boots faster than the Upstart system

...
> Where is This Going?
> More importantly however, it is also our plan to experiment with systemd not only for optimizing boot times, but also to make it the ideal session manager, to replace (or possibly just augment) gnome-session, kdeinit and similar daemons.
>