Query Takes more time in SQL Server 2008
Sure; upgrade your hardware.  Note that rendering results in Management Studio is notoriously slow, so keep that in mind if that is your performance benchmark tool.  However ...

The big question I have is: why do you care?  I'm hard pressed to come up with a legitimate reason to return the entire 550k record set.  You're not going to display that much on any screen in an application.  No one would ever view it.  If you're returning it for post-processing an aggregation or something of the sort, you should be aggregating it in SQL, then returning it.  If you are dumping it in an ETL process, long queries basically come with the territory (unless you're clever and come up with an incremental Extraction).