Design verification is big business and your VP was exactly right, a factor of 100 to 1000 speed increase would allow for much more thorough testing and broader testing as well, for instance hooked up to other hardware with reasonable fidelity compared to the real thing. Still coarse but a lot better than nothing. Good call. It isn't rare at all to have a respin if you don't do design verification.

One of the nicer stories about the first ARM chip is that they built a software simulator to verify the design and as a result they found plenty of bugs in the hardware before committing to silicon. The first delivered chips worked right away.