A bit of a tangent but this is one of the top reasons I buy Apple laptops. Sleep/Wake is pretty much flawless. I occasionally had some hangs on wake back in Tiger or earlier versions of Mac OS, but never with Leopard or later.
Weird, because every now and again my Macbook will just die after waking up. I also find that while initially it was really fast and worked great, it's now really slow and takes up to 10 seconds, while my linux laptop (which doesn't even have an SSD) wakes up pretty much instantly
Is there anything suspicious in the system log? I'm guessing that you might have a kext (like for VMWare Fusion of VirtualBox) that's misbehaving when waking up.
Some of the newer PCs aren't too bad with this. My desktop sucks with sleep, but the two laptops I use are pretty flawless (though one's battery is terrible). I haven't shut one down in 3 weeks, and the other in a week. They're pretty standard, too; the good battery life one was around $600.
Both me and my father have had "sleep" incidents with our macbooks where the computer ran at full blast with the lid closed in our bags until they were too hot to touch. I'm on Lion now and I still occasionally have this problem. Apples are not immune, but I agree that they are the best at sleep and wake I've had so far.
