Having just spent some time optimizing the ORM we use in our applications due to running into some performance issues I can say there are a lot more critical areas than this. For example High overhead on each field/property access can add up quickly, as Model getters/setters can easily be the most used methods in an entire application.
Do you mean things like a property access over a foreign key causing a query? A good ORM should let you optimise by joining.
How larger result sets (i.e 10,000-100,000 small rows) are handled can also be important, both as a scalability problem (will my application continue to work when I have 1,000 locations?) and for general usage (some ORMs can easily require 100mb+ ram for this may rows).
It is a problem with a lot of ORMs if you need to do it, but not something most web apps need - usually you only fetch what you are displaying on the page and you do not often display 10,000 things on one page. If you are calculating aggregates that is usually better done in the database. This leaves things like aggregates your database cannot handle, which are not typical.
I have started feeling frustrated that the natural way of working with an ORM tends to move too much from the database to the application layer - e.g. writing application code when I should be using a check constraint or a trigger.
These factors are probably more important in interpreted language compared to compiled ones (where the ORM models are themselves generated and compiled statically) as the overheads are higher.
I imagine that depends on the language and the framework. I imagine it would be a problem with PHP (at least used in the mod_php type config which is all I know) as everything is recreated on each request. I know the ORM I use, which runs in a persistent process, creates the model classes when you start the app.
It is originally based on Symfony. I don't really like projects forking instead of just working together.
I do not think it is a fork. It uses Symfony components, and it is listed on the Symfony site as a project using symfony:
http://symfony.com/projects/laravel