Most people in the PF forum say it's quite a bit faster than 4e, so I think I'll attend one of the Pathfinder Society events at the local shop.
I call total BS on that. If your players and DM know what they are doing, and are ready to go on their turn, I find that 4e combat is about 50% to 2x faster than PF combat and will go through nearly twice as many rounds in that time, meaning every player gets to go more often.
I play 4e and Pathfinder. In our last PF 4 hours session we had two fights, each one taking up about 60-70 minutes. We have 5 players, all are veterans who know PF well.
In our last 4e four hour session, we had those same 5 players and got through 5 fights, each one taking about 30-35 minutes. We are all veteran 4e players as well.
Both battles were with a party of level 6 PCs vs an appropriate number of foes which makes direct comparison easy.
Here is the rub, though. Because of 4e's combat design, it lends itself naturally to combat. Part of this is because outside of rituals, no powers last more than 5 minutes. In PF, casters have a wide variety of spells and spell durations. PF comes with a lot of other undesirable rules baggage that I won't get into here, but this feeling of openness is one area where it does shine.
I compensated for part of this feel in 4e by house ruling that you can recover an encounter power by expending a standard action on your turn. What this does is make encounter powers that take only a move or a minor action effectively unlimited (by forgoing your standard action every round). Especially when used out of combat where giving up a standard action (which is usually an attack) for a round doesn't hurt so much.
I have yet to find an encounter power that I feel is broken when allowed to refresh this way and it lets my players feel like they can freely use more of their cool utility powers outside of combat.