long delay between clicking and opening, please help!

Hello. I have a newly purchased late 2011 macbook pro and I have been noticing a odd problem. There has been a varying lag between the when I click open a program and when it actually opens. Sometimes things open quickly as they should, but with other programs like eve online and freshly downloaded/installed things, it takes sometimes two to four minutes of seemingly nothing happening before finally the program will spring into life. It's like nothing i've ever seen on a windows computer. Is this something that is typical or do I have some kind of issue (this macbook was purchased refurbished from the apple store, I am still within my 14 day return period)

Any help would be greatly appreciated

 

thank you for these helpful links. I will test it right away. Yes I am using 10.8 mountain lion.

 

Here is the result for my memory, disk and graphics xbench test. Can you tell if it seems normal from this?

http://db.xbench.com/merge.xhtml?doc1=580764&doc2=1&setCookie=true

 

thank you for the comprehensive how to, here are the results of the disk test.