In a freshly generated 1.7.6 world, I spawned in a few player skulls with this command:
/give @p skull 1 3 {SkullOwner:Dinnerbone}
Whenever I place these, it takes about 4 seconds before I actually see a player head(the space looks empty before that), but it appears as a steve skin, and seems to stay that way.
I tried relogging, and tried multiple heads, it doesn't seem to matter.
Could this be connected to the crashes I experienced with player skulls last week?
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If using the new UUID format for SkullOwner it works without lag
SkullOwner{Id:uuid,Name:playername,Propperties:{textures:[{Signature:,Value:}]}}
Seems to be fixed in 14w17a (1.8).

In fact, in 14w17a the delay between placing the (first!) head of a kind is about 1 second.
That delay is probably due to the conversion of the name to UUID and the lookup of the skin of that UUID --> Working by Design.
Confirmed for 14w18b.

14w20b:
Can confirm the lag between right click and the actual appearing of the skull
The skin bug isn't there anymore, it has now Dinnerbone's skin 🙂
Fixed in 14w32b.
Can confirm, but may be related to overload of skin server.