[will_work4tears]

Drupal is pretty slow if you disable the default caching, and sometimes even with the caching (depends on modules loaded) - part of the problem is Drupal's table bloat. I swear a naked install has 100+ tables (and with a few plugins and a few fields enabled, has 250+ tables - so you end up with tens and hundreds of queries per page load).

[SDGT]

Varnish fixes everything.

Drupal's big two issues are bootstrapping drupal, because all those module hooks stack up quick, and the sometimes large amount of queries run to generate a page. Drupal 8 has gotten better about not loading half of the world when a blog post is loaded, but 7 is just a wall of functions.

[Domenic_S]

You seem to be mistakenly thinking that more tables by definition always == more queries. That isn't the case. A bunch of those tables rarely get queried.

I really don't understand people's aversion to database tables. I have a join, the world is ending! Pay attention to your indexes and 9 times out of 10 everything will be fine. For that 1 other time, there's Varnish.