Well, a lot of that gets back to "Android is hard to do rapid prototyping in". I would looove something faster to iterate with personally, but I can also understand how it could be detrimental in the long run. It's too easy to take prototype code and ship it, instead of fixing up the underlying architecture to play nice with all the various lifecycle and different device configuration stuffs. Fragments are a pain to deal with in the early stages, but they force you to modularize your app in such a way that makes long term maintainince and UI changes easier.

You can now see changes "live" in Android studio with the preview pane, which is getting pretty good these days. If you haven't played with that I'd suggest giving it a shot.

The emulator is a disaster, I only ever develop on real devices. Pushing isn't that slow, but it's definitely not as nice as just hitting refresh in a browser.