The conventional wisdom on data structures in functional languages is that immutability costs you. It was a big advance when Okasaki came up with algorithms that have an amortized complexity for lazy functional languages the same as the non-amortized complexity for the data structures with destructive update.
Work is going on in that area; check out Edward Kmett's post "Part I: Deamortized ST" about how to come up with a way to make the amortization unnecessary. (It's a bit reminiscent of Asimov's essay "Behind the Teacher's Back".) I'm hoping that will ultimately mean Haskell will be usable in still more situations.
(Actually, I should just say "read Edward Kmett's blog" period. It's all very good stuff.)
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