Blaming the Operating System for the speed on this is off base. The specs on this
200MHz TI processor, 2-megapixel camera, 64MB of internal RAM, 128MB of ROM
Show that this is a step back down from other HTC machines, the Old HTC Blue Angel had a nominal clock speed of 400 MHz.
The other things is all of the junk that T-Mobile loads up on the machine, with a 200 MHz Clock, and a limited 64 MB of ram, you really don't want to fill up the available RAM with all sorts of junk like all of the standard carrier roms do.
But heck, blame WM6. I know that WM5 was slower in some ways than WM2003SE, but it had data persistence that was missing in WM2003 & WM2003SE. WM6 is faster in my experience than WM5 on the same hardware, other than that I don't see a big difference. The Bluetooth stack is said to be more stable, but I still use wired headsets, so I can't comment on that.