i don't think speed is the only issue. The steps for testing and toying around a theme in wordpress is always a pain : The personn starts by installing wordpres

i don't think speed is the only issue. The steps for testing and toying around a theme in wordpress is always a pain : The personn starts by installing wordpress and a fancy theme on its computer, or on some random server, starts putting content, then wants to migrate all this on some "production" server. Then, most of time, they end up spending an awful lot of time with the wordpress export/import tools (which is made even worse once you starting using payed plugins). Which sometimes involves looking at random php errors. Compare that with copy / pasting a bunch of file via ftp, and then you're done. and it works for backups too...