Have you ever used eclipse or netbeans? Those feels an order of magnitude slower than pharo. I consider pharo a small and fast environment compared to other "IDEs".
The point is I have a choice. I can choose to edit TEXT files in netbeans or eclipse, I can choose to edit them in vim or emacs. Using pharo and smalltalk I'm not even given a choice the environment is forced upon me and I have to use their specific environment.