Android Honeycomb emulator is completely useless

I decided to test drive the new Android 3.0 and tools today.

I updated my Eclipse environment to the latest Helios revision and then downloaded and installed the latest Android SDK and tools.

I created a basic photo slideshow application to test with. However, the Android 3.0 Honeycomb emulator is so slow, it is actually useless for any kind of development or testing. It takes forever for the application to load and start and then it runs extremely slow. The machine I test on is Intel Core i7, 2.67 GHz, quad-core with 12GB RAM, so that is a pretty good machine. I cannot imagine what else the Android emulator might need to run faster.