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Yeah, but the tool shouldn't display them. It should output a report, and a second tool should read it and generate an image file from it, which can then be displayed by a proper image viewer.
Bootchart is a good example.

Turning the system administration tool into a GUI for graph visualization is running its potential for extensibility and automatism for no good reason.

There's no longer a performance penalty in booting a generic kernel. You may have been thinking of a performance hit in older kernels when booting an SMP kernel on a uniprocessor system, but that's long since been fixed.

There's no "choose between different HALs". The kernel does what the HAL would do in Windows, and in distributions like Ubuntu, the same generic 32-bit or 64-bit kernel will work on any 32-bit or 64-bit system, regardless of the number of CPUs or amount of memory over 2GB.

There's no "significant initial install bloat". On Ubuntu 9.04, for example, the entire generic kernel and its modules are around 90MB in total. That includes drivers for everything from joysticks to iSCSI to disk encryption.

There's no "search through drivers" at boot time. The kernel simply ships with a map of device ids (for PCI, ISAPNP, 1394, USB and whatnot other buses) that's used to load the correct driver. The map lookup and loading is almost instantaneous. Most of the driver-related boot delay is in waiting for the hardware to initialize and respond.

There's also no need for anything like sysprep. Linux distributions like Ubuntu or Debian don't keep an SID or require any sort of state reset to prepare for image shipment. This can really simplify image rollout.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "throw out optimizing beyond a certain point". There's nothing particularly difficult about shipping a specialized image with only a certain set of applications. It just doesn't make sense to specialize for minor differences in hardware. Removing, say, Bluetooth support for a system with no Bluetooth hardware will not measurably speed up the boot process, or make it consume less memory. Disk space consumption on the system image is also typically dominated by application software.

(Most of the above also applies to Mac OS X, by the way.)

Sorry to say Linux yes its doable. But you really have to know the tricks.

http://www.ksplice.com/ ksplice can do a lot of kernel updates without needing rebooting.
Then http://www.bootchart.org/ to make sure boot up process is as fast as able. With tuning of the boot and shutdown process 5.3 mins at year gives you at least 10 reboots. Yes 30 second reboots is possible 15 secs to get all services up and serving again and the services shutdown in the last 5 seconds before going to bios or kexec. Yet Linux kernels only update ever 3 in internal structs is only 4 reboots a year so you have spare quite a few spares. Even better if the effected bit is in a module you can just unload and reload.

Now what about those bios's that take forever. kexec Linux kernel loading it replacement so bios is removed from maths. This even saves a few seconds because you can have the replacement kernel and its intrd loaded into ram before you even start the shutdown.

Now this might sound all so great sorry that is still too slow. kexec hot swap is under development. Nice little feature where you run both kernels side by side and transfer control over.

5 9's is reachable as long as hardware failure does not hit. Windows is way behind the game. With kexec hot swap 100 percent uptime is achievable without hardware failure no cluster.

never know how long my linux takes to boot, or if it ever survive next boot, but least i can get nice graphs about what it is doing each time with Bootchart and another cool thing is this video camera from samsung powered with ucLinux which can boot to shell in 80msek.

Besides, the if you follow the links from the fedora-devel post you refer to, all you get is a couple of png images of the boot processes.

That's because the project just started then. Here's the project page now with documentation and more samples:
www.bootchart.org

A couple of other posts refer to this indirectly.
Bootchart is actually some of the coolest use of graphical display of data I have seen in a while:
bootchart
Some of the Solaris 10 guys even used it to improve the boot process on new releases of Solaris 10.
The latest updates (as of a few days ago) continued to streamline the system.