Superior? Sure. But do people need the capabilities beyond what can be reasonably achieved with local models? I think the people that actually sit in that gap are vanishingly small, and if your title contains "Engineer" or "Developer" or something like that, you are not one of those people (at least for doing your job)

As for faster, maybe? It depends on the metrics and what you're doing with it. If you mean TPS, no, I get much higher TPS and even faster TTFT on my local setup than frontier models. If you mean time to complete tasks... maybe. If you're throwing whole projects at it to vibecode, yeah, a frontier model will dump slop so fast it'll make your head spin. If you're doing actual methodical development, like doing spec-driven development and actually reading the specs before spinning off agents to implement them, rather than just having another agent review it and yolo, you'll find that frontier models don't really push the needle that much, and you'll be making high-quality projects.