I know what you mean. USB 1.0 at 12MB was actually slow enough that it was frustrating to use it for certain tasks and you might avoid it if there were an alternative. USB 2.0 is up to forty times that fast, and I've never found anything that causes it to run at a speed that wastes my time. I know they use FireWire for high bandwidth applications like streaming video from a camera to a hard drive and things like that, so maybe that's where USB 3.0 will actually have an advantage over 2.0.
One big way 2.0 was faster than 1.1 is that 1.1 split the bandwidth each time anything else got added to the chain. 2.0 is much better about that.