I won't deny it it was. Like android they had the capability to have the GUI hardware accelerated but never implemented it. Where it did excel was the multitasking. I would normally start 3-4 processes (for example, mail, twitter, music player, browser) let them spool up. By the time you got to the last one task the first would be ready to go.

WebOS 3.0 finally implemented GUI HW acceleration because if it was bad on the smartphone it would be unusable at tablet resolutions.

When people say that android is slow this what they mean, the interface doesn't flow it jerks.