Welcome to the SeeMeCNC Community

So I've been using Repeteir host and slic3r for a long time... and today slic3r was just refusing to create supports on a particular item I am printing, so I decided to give cura a try. When I start a print sliced with cura for some reason the printer takes an extremely long time to reach the bed

Is this normal? I mean, it takes a good minute or two for it to move all the way down to the bed... It's quite annoying.

You probably have the Z Movement speed set excessively slow in the Slicer.
None delta machines tend to use lead screws for Z and are usually not capable of fast Z motion, so the defaults tend to be very low.
Slic3r probably assumes the speed is capped in the firmware.
It could also be that the initial Z move is not setting a speed, in which case it'll use whatever the last move speed was. If this is the case you could add a line of GCode to the start GCode that explicitly sets the XYZ speeds.