People in the discussions did mention the slow speed. Together with the small amount of RAM, using the disk drive as a co-processor only ever made sense for a very select number of applications.
Outside of demos, the most interesting suggestion was to offload data(base) querying logic to the drive.
I think the 1541 transfer speed only ever felt truly fast to people who'd experienced years of using the 1530 (the cassette tape storage device).