It is amazing that my old 8 MHz 80386 computer at home responds to my commands much faster than the much newer 1100 MHz Pentium I have at work. The response time of the new machine is often so bad that I think the system is dead. But when I start moving my finger to the RESET button, it suddenly reacts and carries out my command.
I think that this is because the 8 MHz 80386 computer runs on MS-DOS 5.0, (an archaic but small operating system) but that 1100 MHz Pentium is driven by Windows98. If I installed Windows XP on it, the response time would get even worse.
This strange behavior is linked to the fact that the modern operating systems are very bloated. The system spends its time by transferring "wadding" data from disk drive to memory and later back to the disk drive (because of lack of memory space) and each application initializes various subsystems from the system library even if they are never used. In fact the response time of modern operating systems is primarily determined by the speed of the disk drive and the amount of memory stuffed into the box, not the speed of the CPU (here is detailed discussion about the topic).
Since the OSHS wants to be tiny, it does not have to spend time moving all kinds of "wadding" data here and there. This will lead to much more agile response to the commands. Note that this does not necessarily mean that the commands will be carried more quickly but the system will not look dead when it is only swapping code and data of the commanded process from the disk.