Now that they have moved to Froyo this might be a better alternative to develop/test apps on as opposed to the extremely slow emulator. Hopefully there is a VBox/Vmware compatible image available.
I think they said the emulator is slow because it doesn't have GPU acceleration and because it's emulating the ARM architecture on the x86 (though this might not be a very big issue). They said a fix is coming by the end of the year.
Its even slow to run it on a phone. I specifically made sure to use a game framework that has both desktop/phone support to do most of my development on the pc and port it later on. Saves so much time getting around running apps on the phone when unnecessary to the development cycle.
