Reports show that it is no faster, unfortunately.
If you haven't seen it, here's a parody of the original iPhone commercial showing a 3G on iOS4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdk2cJpSXLg
That being said, maybe my understanding of how iPhone updates happen is a little flawed. I'm not too clear if it wipes your phone clean and then resyncs everything after the update. Or does it keep your data on the phone during the upgrade?
Overall, 4.0 was not a good upgrade for the 3G.