Question: Out of curiosity, why does it often take *seconds* to obtain network configuration via DHCP when the CPU is capable of processing millions of operations per second and ping to the router takes a couple of milliseconds?

In my home environment with one WiFi router and about 5 devices, it is not rare to see times like 5-10 seconds.

Answer: 
Two reasons (and solutions) I found when I wanted fast replies from my DHCP server. 

1) My DHCP did a ping of the address it wanted to allocate. This added 3 seconds delay. I removed this by changing the DHCP config to have a mapping for MAC Address to IP address. This is basically using DHCP to allocate a static address. This removed the 3 second delay for me.

2) I have an isolated network, however, you may get this at times. There was a DNS look up being done, which for me resulted in many seconds delay from getting an IP Address from DHCP. In the DHCP server config there were options for our domain and DNS servers. After removing DNS options and above change I got instant replies from the DHCP server. (\*\*)

These issues were what I found in my setup. Your milage may vary.

cheers

LB

(\*\*) If I had a penny for every time a failed DNS lookup caused a delay which resulted in a strange knock on affect which resulted in me scratching my head, I would have many many pennies.
I don´t know what scenary you have, but in the real world you get the ip address...etc from an old server (dhcp server is always the one with the oldest hardware :) ) with lots of requests, behind a firewall, one or several routers/switches... Latency, cpu power...and in a windows world, dhcp implementation is not as efficient as we would like!.