I would rather have my users wait a couple of seconds for the page to load, than show all the components and have the browsers load the sprites and background images. i.e. the "flash of unstyled text" but only for images.

Is there any way you guys can forcibly pre-fetch all kendo images (maybe by creating invisible <img /> tags) so that the images would've been cached, and the UI appears instantly, even for people through slow connections

maybe, you can make this optional - because it will be useful for people using a lot of kendo elements on the page - when compared to the people using it as a minor portion.

I would love to do:
kendo.preload(function()
{});