Excel is horrible. Functionality is great (it's packed with features), but it's just so clunky and slow. So I have to agree, Numbers feels like a light weight Excel that meets my demands as well.
If you are using significant amounts of data, Excel even on Mac is light years ahead of Numbers I’ve found. And probably still slower than Excel on Windows. My experience was using pivot tables with 80k-100k rows and maybe 20 columns. Excel was instant and Numbers took dozens of seconds of UI completely frozen to update the table.