YES. I have a MacBook Pro Core i7 from a little while back with an old style spinning rust drive and a 11" MacBook Air Core 2 Duo.

For purely CPU bound things, sure, the Core i7 kicks the pants out of the Core 2. Same for videogames. For day to day use, though, switching between Eclipse, Xcode, Chrome, etc. the Air provides a much more uniform experience. At its best it's far slower than the Pro at its best, but at its worst it's much faster and more responsive. I rarely see beachballs on the Air. I used to see them all the time on the Pro (the Pro has been sitting on a shelf for the past eight months as I switched to working exclusively on my Air, partially for this reason).

So my experience is that something may not be broken, but something definitely isn't set up optimally for users with poor disk performance and high memory/CPU performance.