Google slowest of engines to index new sites?

My test results, your thoughts appreciated.

[inbound]

It's believed by many people that a google sandbox is in operation, although many think it is not the case. Here are the results of a test that I have conducted on a 44 page, content rich site for a client (all researched and written from scratch, total research time was over 2 man months). The site is AAA compliant and has no barriers to indexing.

The work on links to the site is due to start this week so no links to the site were posted anywhere, just hand submission to let the engines know the site is up. The site is for a service based company operating in a defined geographical area.

Yahoo - Crawled in 3 stages about a week apart, now has 22 pages indexed correctly and is #1 on most targetted - keyword town - phrases. First appeared in 3 days.

MSN - Only 1 page indexed but very well placed in searches. Took about 5 days to appear.

Google - Just site URL listed, no content showing and nowhere on the results, Google has crawled several times and it seems they know what is on the pages as they have been able to follow links to other pages.

I'll update this thread with details of how the indexing goes from here, does anyone have similar stories to tell?

I know there are other ways to speed up indexing, I'm just curious how things pan out if you just do the minimum (as many people do).