I'm going to repost from another thread, since it's directly relevant...

...and yet, it doesn't? It may be a virtual machine, but it seems like that's sort of the whole design paradigm in Android and everything is optimized and only getting faster and faster to support that from the hardware/processor on up to the applications. I'm not sure where you've been, but I've seen some incredibly fluid applications for everything from video editing to video games to--get this, even MEGADEMO scene type stuff. Sure, it's a virtual machine based operating system but despite your word for it, there's plenty of reviews and video out there that seems to disagree with the assertion you're attempting to make that virtual machine code runs slow. (i.e. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWTTVr0lvmo or http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvKGGYfM-Dg or any number of other demos of people running pretty buttery smooth stuff on devices that are as much as a year old sometimes--by the by, that last one takes virtualization a step farther by emulating the Tegra chipset graphics on non-Tegra devices... so.. there's that, too.) Have you even used an Android device lately?