In the FreeBSD mailinglists I stumbled over a post which refers to a blog-post which describes why ZFS seems to be slow (on Solaris).
In short: ZFS guarantees that the NFS client does not experience silent corruption of data (NFS server crash and loss of data which is supposed to be already on disk for the client). A recommendation is to enable the disk-cache for disks which are completely used by ZFS, as ZFS (unlike UFS) is aware of disk-caches. This increases the performance to what UFS is delivering in the NFS case.
There is no in-deep description of what it means that ZFS is aware of disk-caches, but I think this is a reference to the fact that ZFS is sending a flush command to the disk at the right moments. Letting aside the fact that there are disks out there which lie to you about this (they tell the flush command finished when it is not), this would mean that this is supported in FreeBSD too.
So everyone who is currently disabling the ZIL to get better NFS performance (and accept silent data corruption on the client side): move your zpool to dedicated (no other real FS than ZFS, swap and dump devices are OK) disks (honest ones) and enable the disk-caches instead of disabling the ZIL.
I also recommend that people which have ZFS already on dedicated (and honest) disks have a look if the disk-caches are enabled.