Before you go all out and start putting together your own VM, be forewarned that entails a lot of work. The solution is to use a VirtualBox VM with Android on it instead of the Android emulator. I ran across a blog post by Chris Muir of Oracle, which offered a way out of emulator hell. Also when I give talks, it is nice to be able to easily project my work, holding my phone in the air for the audience is not an ideal solution. I for one, don't want my phone tied to my dev box. But that is still far from an ideal solution. Most Android developers simply debug to a device and avoid the headache.
While Google has done a commendable job of making each iteration of the emulator faster, it is still painfully slow. The slowness of the Android emulator has been the butt of many a joke since it was first unveiled.
