I can understand the advantage of Standby: the battery will last for up to 30 days, which is pretty cool. And it makes sense that this might take longer to wake up if OSX has to load everything back into RAM. But the current impact on the everyday user experience is pretty awful. I'm used to my old MBP waking from sleep very quickly and the new MBP Retina takes ages.
Given that Apple probably can't make the wake-up instantaneous due to having to repopulate the RAM, there is a couple of things I think they should do:
(1) They need a 'loading' symbol or progress bar to be shown while the machine wakes up from Standby. This indicates that something is happening and we need to wait. At the moment you see the login box but it is frozen. This is bad because you start typing your password and nothing happens, so it feels broken. I think this makes the problem feel a lot worse.
(2) Perhaps there should be an option in System Preferences to disable Standby mode.