Is quantum annealing faster than simulated annealing/genetic/other state-of-the-art optimization algorithms?
Quantum annealing essentially offers a square-root speed-up over classical simulated annealing in many circumstances. So, yes, it is potentially a faster approach for some optimization problems, but the speed-up isn't enough to make most hard problems tractable.

Unfortunately, you cannot efficiently simulate quantum annealing classically, because any approaches we know of require you to keep track of the state of the system, which requires keeping track of exponentially many parameters (the amplitude of each possible classical state). Thus any attempt to simulate quantum annealing incurs a huge overhead which kills any advantage.