Depends on your definition of slow. Throughput-wise, I think it’s fairly decent — we typically set up 4 EBS volumes in raid0 and get 4GB/sec for a really decent price.
Depends on what volume types you are using. For random access - with io2 you can get 256K IOPS per volume, and if you do RAID0, on the largest instance you can get 400K IOPS.
Directly-attached vs over-the-network storage can be fairly different, but going back to a spinning drive is not a fair statement.
Even provisioned won't get you the access times of a direct-attached SSD. Speed of light and all that - EBS is using the network under the hood, it's not a direct connection to the host.
