It would be interesting to see whether System 7 is "wicked fast" on the early Power Macs or not - they did contain a lot of 68k code which would slow things down of course, and I seem to remember reading that the early PPC versions were a bit buggy too, but then again System 7 is more lightweight than 9.1 or even 8.x, so who knows? 9.1 certainly takes a long time to boot up on my PM6100, though it's responsive enough once warmed up. Back in 1994 the first PPCs were of course very fast machines anyway, I'd say they were considerably better than the old clunkers from the PC side of the day - I expect they seemed "wicked fast" anyway, even if 7.1.2 was slower than it should have been on them.
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Main system: custom C2D 2.66GHz tower/4GB RAM/2600XT 512 MB/500GB HD/XP Pro x86+Vista Business x64
Main Mac: Beige G3 minitower (Sonnet G4 500MHz/640 MB DVD/USB/Radeon 32 MB/OS 9.2.2+10.4.11)