I tried warty when it came out and it was ok, but i found it a little slow , have there been and speed improvements for hoary and on a different note is there something like depclean (gentoo) for apt-get so i rid myself of dependencies not in use?

i dont know about the dependencies question you were asking..
but i also tried 4.10 when it was released, and it was easier than most.. but, yes, slow. but thats not ubuntu's fault i believe... its the WM that you were probably using, gnome? its very resource hungry, and i noticed it was very slow too and didnt like that. however, right when 5.04 or whatever the version for hoary is came out, i immediately got it and put it on.. its, in my opinion, a must have update over warty. however, i didnt notice any speed increase.. but overall it is much better.

there is something called deborphan to get rid of unused packages. gnome is slow, gentoo might improve the speed a little bit but not that much as you compile from source.

If your computer has more than 512MB+ RAM and 2GHZ+, gnome(ie warty desktop) should be fast enough...