Compared to Safari? Really? I'm honestly surprised, as an iPhone user who had to put up with Safari for 3 years. The only nice feature about it is the Readability-powered Reader button.
search for "nitrous" on cydia
But even if not, how many mobile websites use heavy JS? Chrome appears to use page pre-fetching as well, or at least that's what I gather from the "preload webpages" setting.