I say toss it in a PR, and assuming the Travis build passes this sounds completely reasonable to me.  

On Thursday, December 13, 2012 9:42:04 PM UTC-6, Steven Silvester wrote:
Hey all, I noticed that loading skimage seemed to take a bit longer than I'd like, so I profiled it.  On my machine, it takes 1.6 seconds to import skimage, 0.4 of which was from numpy, and 1.2 of which was from loading nose in skimage/__init__.py.  This simple patch brings my import time down to ~0.4 seconds, since it only imports nose when the test function is called.

diff --git a/skimage/__init__.py b/skimage/__init__.py
index 1ac121b..f3e5e88 100644
--- a/skimage/__init__.py
+++ b/skimage/__init__.py
@@ -84,8 +84,9 @@ def _setup_test(verbose=False):
         return f
 
 
-test = _setup_test()
-test_verbose = _setup_test(verbose=True)
+test = lambda : _setup_test()()
+test_verbose = lambda : _setup_test(verbose=True)()
+test_verbose.__doc__ = test.__doc__ = 'Invoke the skimage test suite.'
 
 
 def get_log(name=None):