I believe it should be high priority for the Electrum system to show unconfirmed payments as rapidly as possible, so as to make for a Newbie friendly user experience.
I agree to an extent. However I think the problem is mitigated for "newbie users" because they will likely use "auto connect" and I'm assuming lagging servers will not be autoconnected to.
Of course the electrum server software could probably be made to perform better, but I'm guessing it'd be quite a bit of work.
Until then and although it's a bit sad and maybe even mildly concerning (centralization), maybe your little atom (not to discredit it, but I assume it's the bottleneck in your system when electrum is digesting transactions) will have to leave the work to faster machines regarding servicing the masses?