>I have switched the SQL Server 2012 to run in SQL Server 2012 instead of the emulation to 2008. So far, having removed the emulation, is being reported by two users that the impression is that this is very fast. Is it the case that it should be faster?

I'm not aware of any reason why that would be the case. SQL 2012 has some big performance boosts with the new columnstore index, and they rewrote the buffer pool associated with that. But out of the box, to the best of my knowledge I wouldn't expect SQL 2012 to be faster just by removing the emulation.