If you're trying to rank for very competitive terms you will likely wait forever to attain good rankings using only internal links.
Yep, it could take a long time or it can be speeded up too, depends entirely on the search engine marketing strategy. In the meantime, it is impossible not to acquire some incoming links, it happens naturally to some degree. If a webpage can ammass a volume of naturally generated links it can speed up the process of attaining credibilty and importance even more.
There is no doubt though, highly optimized well-crafted webpage/websites fair better in the SERPs, their rankings are easier to maintain and their market share of
qualified traffic evolves as the web site promotion grows.