Before adjudicating that 2 fonts are equal, Font.equal obtains
the transform for each for and compares all the elements of the matrix.
It has been that way for many releases.

New checks for correctness and the superscript/width features in 1.5 made
added more work to be done.

The code doesn't appear to be especially slow - most non-equal fonts
are very quickly identified and the it can verify that two fonts are
equal at a sufficient speed for most purposes : approx 10million per
second on a 1.2GHz sparc system. But it can be made about twice as
fast for that case with some tweaks.