I can say that the display & overall performance is noticeably faster on the two actual computers I tested on than under qemu on my Linux system.
You'd probably want to use `-enable-kvm` so it's not doing full software emulation. Assuming you're running this on another x86-64 machine.
It makes sense that it would default to using SeaBIOS; QEMU has a lot of options whose defaults were more reasonable 20 years ago.
The approach the project has settled on is to say that providing user friendly defaults should be the job of a "management layer" piece of software like libvirt, and QEMU proper should concentrate on providing flexible and orthogonal options which that other software can use to tell it what to do.
But in this case, my suggestions should be fairly backwards compatible; retaining the default of BIOS but adding a simple `--firmware uefi` option would change nothing for existing users, and even defaulting to `--firmware uefi,bios` should be mostly compatible since it just tries UEFI and then promptly falls back to BIOS.
New top level command line options are rare these days, and magic "do what I mean" options also rare: we tend to prefer "tell us specifically what you want".
I don't think you can make those small tweaks without breaking tens of thousands of users' production setups which depend on those defaults.