Article "Easy Debian Harmattan with translucent virtual keyboard" in my blog, translated from portuguese-br to english by Google.

There is a table with performance comparison between Nokia N9 (Easy Debian with experimental Debian wheezy image) x notebooks running Ubuntu 12.04. Starting 1st time in seconds / 2nd time in seconds :

LibreOffice Writer 3.5.4 : 6s / 1s (XPS 15), 7s / 2s (A1215B), 13s / 6s (N9);
Abiword 2.9.2 : 5s / 1s (XPS 15), 7s / 3s (A1215B), 16s / 11s (N9);
Gnumeric 1.10.17 : 3s / 1s (XPS 15), 3s / 1s (A1215B), 5s / 3s (N9);
Firefox 14.0.1 / Iceweasel 10.0.6 : 4s / 1s (XPS 15), 4s / 2s (A1215B), 7s / 4s (N9);
TeXMaker 3.2 : 5s / 1s (XPS 15), 5s / 1s (A1215B), 4s / 1s (N9);
wxMaxima 11.08/12.04 : 2s / 1s (XPS 15), 2s / 1s (A1215B), 2s / 1s (N9).

Hardware descriptions :
XPS 15 : Dell XPS 15 L502X with Ubuntu 12.04 64 bits, Core i7 2670QM 4 cores @ 2.2-3.1 GHz, 1+6 MB cache L2/L3, 8GB RAM DDR3 1,333 MHz, 1TB 5,400 RPM SATA hard drive;
A1215B : Asus 1215B with Ubuntu 12.04 64 bits,, AMD C-50 2 cores @ 1.0GHz, 1 MB cache L2, 2GB RAM DDR3 1,066 MHz, 320 GB 5,400 RPM SATA hard drive;
N9 : Nokia N9 with MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan PR1.3, TI OMAP 3630 ARM Cortex A8 @ 1.0 GHz, 1GB RAM mobile DDR.

So we see that Nokia N9/N950 is very fast, between not too slow to same speed compared to netbooks, low-price notebooks and even high-spec notebooks !

PS : the notebook's bottleneck is the hard disk, while the N9 has flash memory. With flash (SSD) memory, state-of-the-art notebooks start the above softwares in 1-2 s maximum.