The poor video performance does have something to do with the way SE VGA handles the emulation of QVGA apps. And I wouldn't be surprised if Toshiba also broke something with the SE upgrade and how the ATI is accessed. Or SE changed the rules.
I went from MW2003FE to SE, and after Picard's updates to Betaplayer, I never really thought about the video performance issues. Then, I switched back to FE to play around with Warfare Inc in VGA, and decided to mess with Betaplayer and PocketTV Enterprise. FE was dramatically faster with both video player, with PTV displaying VGA videos 10fps faster from 15fps to 25fps under FE.
The implementation of VGA under SE is suspect at this point. Granted, they need to address the legacy issues, but not at the expense of the killing the system's performance. And please, no "Toshiba's are always slow" posts. Go to the PocketQuake forum and see what fps the E805 got under FE. Sure, it is no match for the Asus, but other than the new Dell, what is?