What platform are you on? I found the emulator unusable on modern OSX and Windows 7 desktops and, to my surprise, perfectly usable on my two year old laptop running Ubuntu.
It's a pain to use on Windows. I had a pretty beefy machine that was brought to a crawl by the emulator. I hope Google is listening. Visual studio for Windows Phone 7 was not such a hog and I tend to spend more time working in it these days.
