http://screencast.com/t/HTHffnbkIQt
The waiting time before the HTML started loading was almost .5s. Look at all the waiting time on the .pngs.
I know 3seconds doesn't sound like alot of time. But, to get such a basic web page, it is quite long. But, it seems mostly to be lag rather than load/render time.
Actually, this is a pretty complicated web page. You'll notice that after it has loaded, the navigation is almost instant, as the whole page is a Javascript application.
We'll definitely optimize it further though the Beta period. Most of the JS used is minified and embedded in the HTML file. CSS as well, apart from the FontAwesome CSS which we'll also minify; thanks for the catch.
The wallet.js file you see unminified has been kept this way on purpose as we want people to be able to inspect the core wallet code easily.
The servers are on one of the largest Datacenters in Europe, in Germany. About the CDN, see below.
We won't use externally referenced JS for security purposes. I'll quote our announcement from the nxt forum here as well, which mentions this point among others.