The amount of applications on the average consumer's laptop is such a tiny space to search over that there really is no excuse for this being anything other than instant.
iOS and macOS suffer this too, it's like I open search and the operating system awakes from a hangover and makes sure it's wearing pants first
iOS and macOS aren't even close to the awfulness of search on Windows.
Tip: Spotlight searches through all data and can be slow, but there's a separate App Library search that only searches the app names and it's instant.