In the apps I've written, it's not common for timer and/or I/O events to come into the run loop during an animation. Hardware acceleration will make a much bigger difference. Romain measured a 1000X performance improvement in one case: http://atnan.com/blog/2011/11/10/ios-vs-android-ics-hardware...

I/O in the main thread and GC are also common culprits. StrictMode is helping with the first. The latter was improved in Android 2.3 with the concurrent garbage collector. There are still more improvements that can be had there, but like I said, HW acceleration is the biggest win. When apps start optimizing for HW acceleration, allocations will likely decrease (because the apps won't be re-drawing on every frame), and GC overhead will become even less of an issue.