Comparing apples and oranges here. The first generation of S^3 devices only had a crippling amount of 32 MB of video ram. So while it is faster, it is crippled in ways that the GPU on the N9 isn't.

The current Asha line has terrible performance, the Asha 311 has only 128 MB RAM, the 310 even less. Faster hardware is actually very cheap nowadays, optimizing an OS for such low specs is really expensive (because it is hard).
I very much doubt that the next "budget" smart feature-phones will have anything less than 256 MB ram.