Does using Drupal.ajax() offer any benefits over jQuery.ajax()?
There isn't really any difference in this context; at the lowest level both will use a standard XHR, so I reckon there's a good chance the bottleneck is the server-side building of the View. 

You can test that by profiling, or in a pinch, returning a static string from the AJAX callback temporarily and stress testing the server. If you don't see the bottleneck, you know that building the View is the expensive bit.

If you're able to build up a query for the node data, and render the HTML manually, you should definitely see a performance improvement. A that point, though, you might want to question if using Views is the right thing in the first place :)