What do I need to improve performance of the Android emulator? I currently use Ubuntu 10.10, and I find the emulator extremely slow. However, I have an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (T5200 processor) with 4G of RAM. What do I need to improve performance? Better hardware? A minimal Linux distribution?
Past versions of the emulator were extremely slow on all platforms.  However, there are now native x86 versions of the emulator; performance should be considerably improved.  You should be able to get them through the Android SDK (or through Intel's website, see this Stack Overflow post).

However, I would recommend (for end users) Memu instead; it's very fast and reliable.  Genymotion is the best alternative if you aren't on Windows.