So far I am finding it a bit faster than the previous 12.1 version release. At least on the virtual machine I have it running on. Of course it's currently setup for a desktop type environment and having to essentially remove server daemons allowed a bit more memory overhead. I definitely enjoy the KDE snappiness more than the Gnome Unity (or even Gnome Shell) response. Hopefully they will correct a few (if not all) the annoyances in the next iteration of Gnome but we'll see as the changes are pushed.