Apparently I've got far too much time on my hands today. :) Attached is a patch to add command-line support for loadvm. Usage is:
$ qemu -loadvm file.vm disk.img
Which is equivalent to:
$qemu -S disk.img
followed by these console commands:
(qemu) loadvm file.vm
(qemu) c
The advantage to this solution is to allow for a "quickstart" of the guest os to a specific saved state. There was talk a while back of using something like this to have an instant-on knoppix installation.
Please note, that this is very much a hack that I was able to put together only because Fabrice's original vm load/save code is so well contained. Literally, all I did was add the code to call the subroutine on startup. I'm not a c programmer, so please feel free to do whatever code cleanup is necessary and place it under whatever license is needed to be included in QEMU.
loadvm.diff