nah, not really. It's not sluggish, but I wouldn't say it's fast.1Ghz dual processor with only a gig of ram. I'm still using my mirrored door G4 with OS 10.3.9.
do you have your scratch disk set to the same drive that the software is on? If not, try it (if you have the space/memory) It actually helps a lot.
You have a mac don't you...
my pc is a dual core 2.4 Ghz with 2gb of ram. I tried doing other stuff while in illustrator and found out I was wrong, I can pretty much run anything except Photoshop which is what I tried originally that lead me to the conclusion I had earlier.