I’ve recently tested Local vs. Laravel Valet a bit, and found that Local isn’t really that much slower anymore, if at all.
However, I’ve also seen instances where a site on a “real” remote server felt quite a bit faster than Local on my MacBook Pro (which is the scenario described by @midihead7 above). This I find a bit hard to understand, especially when said remote server is a run-of-the-mill shared server, not some fancy VPS. I’m really looking forward to the VirtualBox-free Local and hope we’ll get a nice performance boost, be it with 10 or with 70 active plugins.