I use Parabola on a server. It previously had Arch's initscripts: the most buggy, unreliable and hardest to use init system that I know. It required big shell scripts for starting a daemon, often failed stopping them and left old ones running, so configuration changes wouldn't apply to the running ones. They would also die while running and fail to restart. Order of starting daemons was completely manual, the next tasks waited for the previous one unless it was asynchronous (it usually couldn't reliably be since it was used by other services).
Systemd has simple configuration files for services (several lines in a well-documented format to start a daemon), manages dependencies, starts services when the dependencies started, supports socket activation (makes e.g. handling FastCGI services with nginx easy), is the same on different distros (I don't need to know completely separate init script systems for Debian and Parabola; while Debian uses many existing init scripts written for sysvinit with systemd). Speed is imo a sideeffect of handling dependencies, parallel service activation, socket activation and using single-task C programs and service files calling programs directly instead of shell scripts. Journal has a nicer interface that what syslog daemons that I knew had, journalctl does what I needed less and tail for with additional features like per-service filtering. Ubuntu has systemd since utopic (Debian since Wheezy while it's vastly improved in Jessie), Trisquel should get it in 8.0.
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