There is one case I know of where Emacs (via Cygwin) has performance issues on Windows: listing directories in remote volumes. Per StackOverflow [0], dired is slow because `df` is slow on NTFS. So, you can eliminate df to speed up dired by a lot.

`(setq directory-free-space-program nil)`

0: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26128693/emacs-dired-slo...

Main issue is magit. Currently the repository I work on is small enough that I put up with it. But I can see this being a real deal breaker for many.

There are certain Emacs features that may require some UNIX tools like find or grep. Often I've found ways to configure it to use ripgrep and fd instead (both are trivial installs in Windows, and generally faster than grep and find anyway).

I think git is slow on Windows, and magit doesn't make the problem better or worse.

Nope - git is mostly fast on Windows. It's magit that's the problem - or rather how magit does things. It launches several git processes to do basic things like status or commit, and that is fundamentally slow in Windows.

See https://magit.vc/manual/magit/Microsoft-Windows-Performance....

So you are saying git is slow on Windows, but only because starting any process is slow on Windows. Interesting. I've heard there is work in progress to have magit use libgit2 instead of running the git executable. That should help.