When Armory has its full blockchain and database files ready, subsequent runs of Armory will take a slight while before it's ready. Starting up Armory will do a consistency check on your wallet, then start bitcoind which will, in turn, check for new transactions, download and append those to your local copy of the blockchain ("synchronizing with network"), then Armory will update its database files to match any newly downloaded transactions ("build databases"). On my Intel i7 with 16 GB RAM it takes just over 2 minutes from I launch Armory till it's ready for use, so I generally just leave it running throughout the day.
Consistency checks and DB initialization take place in parallel. On small wallets (what you and I use for our daily Bitcoin needs) the consistency checks are usually fast enough that it may look like the DB is initialized only after the checks are completed. On massive wallets (10k+ addresses), the DB is usually ready before the check are finished
I am unaware of whether running a supernode (in Armory version 0.93 and above) will speed up startup time?
No, it's the contrary. Once all optimizations are implemented (not all of them will make it for this release), fullnode will achieve acceptable speed on pretty much any PC. Supernode is meant for server backends and will be expectedly slow on any PC. Power users with top of the line CPUs, tons of RAM and SSD raids can expect to get supernode to startup within minutes.
