"because the UI elements weren’t hardware accelerated until Honeycomb"
That's a common misconception.
Android has been using hardware acceleration since before 1.0. There have been more and more HA-backed new APIs with each releases or so but it has been here from the start.
Also, things are not so simple that 'activate hardware acceleration' is the gold solution that solves drawing.
In truth, many things can go wrong in the time between 2 frames.
never say never. for example, (and somewhat analogously), remember the change beetween NT 3.5 and 4.0 to move graphics from the Win32 subsystem into the executive, with the resulting performance improvement.