ARM and x86 architectures are completely different.
a 1 GHz arm processor is roughly the same (computational power wise) as a 400 - 500 MHz x86 processor.
So to answer your question. Android doesn't run slow, actually it's lightening fast considering the architecture differences...
How fast do you think windows 10 would run on a Pentium 2? (with touch screen apps etc)
(my older android tablet was pretty slick, for touch screen, sure the onscreen keyboard lacked any tactile feedback, but I could type properly, with both hands. the windows one, is just a bit meh, not just lacking feedback, but also a bit too slow performance wise to properly type at speed with the onscreen keyboard, (good job it came with a real keyboard build into the case!)
my old tablet, (quad core 1.2Ghz arm with 1GB RAM running android) never seemed slow
my new tablet (quad core 1.8Ghz Atom with 2GB RAM running windows 10) is roughly the same performance wise... both had/have plenty of grunt... (but think about what I just said, 1.2 Ghz translates to roughly half the clock speed.... it's like running android on ~2 core 600MHz hardware with a GB of RAM, so my new windows tablet has (twice cores 3 times the speed = 6times more CPU grunt twice as much RAM, and runs about the same...
whilst I don't have issues with the tablet I've got, then I think if I cut both the clock speed (which would be the effect of moving to ARM) and the core count to a quarter of what it is I'd have real problems...)
to be fair if only the core count was quartered and the clock speed stayed at twice what you're saying then I think it'd be uncomfortably slow to use!
(where on earth have you found a single core x86 processor? that'll run windows 8? - I've got an old laptop with a 2.4Ghz single core processor, and 2GB of RAM (old centrino) and that's quite painful with windows XP. (fine for small apps around the same age as the laptop, but as soon as you try to run anything more current, (say itunes, or firefox, or open a laptop with flash) then it gets real slow and real hot. (I wouldn't even try windows 7 or windows 8 on that thing.
(so as well as not thinking about architecture difference your statement that windows would run fine on a single core 1GHz cpu and a 1GB of RAM just isn't true.) (running XP and expecting to do anything with twice the resources you listed is like pulling teeth.)
