I have recruited a developer to implement Apex-based functionality on a Salesforce.com instance, and my experience so far is that although the creation of objects/fields/validation/reports/search is VERY fast compared to the likes of ASP.NET, when it comes to creating Visualforce pages and add-on functionality not supported by the primary platform it is very slow. 

As an example, recently my dev quoted several times the amount of time required to implement a specific feature than I know would be required to implement it in an ASP.NET app. He put this down to the cloud-based environment (yes, he's using Eclipse) and the fact that it's necessary to continually upload the code with all the tests on a regular basis.

It's a small app so we're not using the sandbox, instead deploying direct to production, the reasoning for that is the risks of this are quite tolerable, and overall it saves time.

I'm interested to hear if others generally find Apex development to be slower than other platforms.