Funny, I just bought my first RPi in order to run Pi-Hole. It works decently from my daughter's tablet. I enabled it on the router so the whole house is covered, but due to uBlock I hardly ever see ads on computers. The nice thing is having "boring text" instead of colorful ads on tablets makes them a much smaller target for kids to tap on.
I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you deviate from the norm. I didn't want to use Google DNS and instead opted for OpenDNS, plus I wanted my own directory structure, etc...
Disabled all ad-blockers and still don't get ads, and the whole experience seems faster. Presumably it takes longer for JavaScript-based utilities to block ads compared to just blackholing them in the hosts file? Anyway, might get a Raspberry Pi or just use an old small form-factor PC with it's own DNS server running the same list.
It then installs an updater via cron to check for updated lists every week.
As to your experience with speed, I'm kind of surprised. The only time I noticed a speed difference is when I blackholed domains in the hosts file that didn't resolve to a valid web server (i.e. resolving to 127.0.0.1 without having a web server running), and that's the opposite of what you describe. The pi-hole script also installs lighttpd to serve up a placeholder page, and uses some tricks like mod_expire to improve performance.
I will say that the installation process can be somewhat painful if you deviate from the norm. I didn't want to use Google DNS and instead opted for OpenDNS, plus I wanted my own directory structure, etc...