I honestly wouldn't describe Eclipse as slow or buggy when I'm doing Java development. This is on a couple year old Thinkpad with maxed-out RAM. Is it worse on OS X? Or with the Android APIs? Or maybe too many plug-ins out of the box?
I'm using it on OS X. My system is a few years old but in comparison to Xcode (which is also pretty buggy) Eclipse is bad. Some of the crashes have been because of Android (for example closing a project while the Android SDK is still loading causes a crash) but I'm not sure of the cause of the other problems.
I have the same experience (no complaints or problems) using it at home on my Ubuntu machine, also with the OpenJDK. When I tried it recently on my Windows 7 machine at work the autosuggest will regularly lock everything up for about 10 seconds and everything's noticeably slower. Not sure if that's the Windows version or the computer - but Visual Studio 2010 runs just fine.
Core Eclipse is (imo) much better than many here seem to believe, but the Android Developer Tools bring back the experience of running Eclipse circa 2003. They're slow, memory hungry, and seemingly hang randomly doing nothing for a very long time, which for standard Java dev doesn't really happen these days.
It has some strange memory caching settings by default. In OSX this makes it slower than it needs to be. I forgot the exact name of the flag, but changing it from the meager 128MB to 512MB speeds it up immensely.