We have been helping our friends at Omni/Tuna with performance issues in their Android version of Eufloria HD. Knowing for sure that the popular Nexus 7 was not performing as well as it should, we started with that device. And since it uses NVIDIA's Tegra 3 SOC, we reached out to NVIDIA developer support to see if they could provide us with assistance.
NVIDIA were excellent and went the extra mile to help out with expert one on one support. Not only did they provide us with all the technical details requested, they offered informed suggestions and followed up several times to see how we were doing. NVIDIA also make available a number of excellent tools, all packaged with the Android NDK making the development process.
With the help of NVidia's very good PerfHUD ES tool we were able to quickly find a 250% performance increase which ironically had nothing to do with the hardware platform. We also found other issues we suspect are affecting a majority of hardware but were not previously able to find because of lack of tools.
Overall, the excellent and inexpensive Nexus 7 combined with NVIDIA's tool chain and support make for a great choice of primary development platform.