Sad to see you go, but this seems like a reasonable conclusion in your case ?
Regarding your issue – I've never come across anything exactly similar myself. Since we're talking about the default multi-language site profile, there's very little data to load, so my initial guess would be that the request, or perhaps the PHP process, gets stuck somewhere. In the case of PHP the file compiler (core feature originally intended to ease migration from 2.x to 3.x) comes to mind – though that probably shouldn't be the case here – while disk based sessions could be another.
Of course the database connection could also be the bottleneck, but if you're sure that it's configured properly, then I have no idea how it could be that slow. MySQL slow query log could help in ruling this issue out though.
If you still want to debug this further, you might want to give database sessions a try (they can be enabled by installing the Sessions / ProcessSessionDB module, which is bundled with the core package), and just in case specifically disable the file compiler by setting $config->moduleCompile and $config->templateCompile to false in /site/config.php.
I have no recent experience with Windows, so not sure if something there could cause the slowdown. That being said, I do know that others are running ProcessWire on Windows, so that alone shouldn't be a problem, unless it's some rather obscure configuration issue there. If other systems are working as expected then a configuration issue sounds less likely. While WordPress admittedly caters for a number of really unlikely borderline cases (including the use of the deprecated mysql PHP extension), Laravel working as expected probably means that the environment itself is properly set up.