The short answer is “yes”. The Honeycomb emulator performance will be improved in future release of the development tools.
For right now, you should start by increasing the amount of device RAM used by the emulator. The default is 256Mb but 1Gb is probably more reasonable.
[Update (April 9 2012) — The latest developer tools release (r18),
combined with a new system image (4.0.3 r2) dramatically improves
performance of the emulator by supporting GPU and CPU acceleration.
More details here.]