5 minutes?! I have over 240 apps on my iPad. This is a slow and painful process of re-building my carefully created folders.
Furthermore, each screen page can hold a max of twenty icons--often fewer actually occupy the page--so the restore process ended up putting apps on pages 12 and 13 of my iPad--which are pages that it can't access! I had to go into iTunes, notice that I had two extra pages--at least they had gray backgrounds to indicate they couldn't be seen on the iPad--and move the icons in iTunes to pages the iPad could access. All because it forgot my folders! Grr...
To be fair, I sort of understand. There could be an identity problem. If they are stored in sort of a database, each app probably has an ID and when they are re-added to the iPad new in the restore process, they could lose that ID. This is why you end up with a duplicate if you add the same song to iTunes from your hard drive; the duplicate doesn't have the same ID so iTunes doesn't think it's the same song.
However, in BOTH cases, there are reasonable identifiers on the files themselves: music has ID3 tags and the apps I would bet have all sorts of identifiers like name and iTunes Store ids. There's really no reason iTunes couldn't guess, and be 98% or more correct every time. It makes no sense. Heck, in the case of music, the ID3 tags make the music land in the same folder in the media directory, so it must have some idea!
While I'm on the subject, why iTunes couldn't just update my iPad OS software during the restore from back up process in one step--instead of doing it in 2-3 steps for which it needed my input--is totally beyond me. It is really frustrating when Apple gets things so wrong.
jason.