1. Jira is a web-application that requires a Java application server. You could run it in anything that supports Java web applications (Jetty, JBoss, Websphere, yada yada yada), but Tomcat is the only one Atlassian supports.
2. Tomcat is not taking huge amounts of resources really, it's probably better to say "Tomcat and everything that this Tomcat is running is taking up resources". If you ran Tomcat without Jira installed, you'd probably barely notice it.
The issue with Jira being slow could be all sorts of issues, it's hard to say what the root cause is. How much memory is allocated to Jira? (Check the system information page in Jira to see that). Do you have virus scanners running on this box? (They're a known issue on Windows servers - the way Windows handles executables and virus scanners is a very broken design). How does your network handle in general? Are you running anything else on this server?
By instinct, I'd say your issue is probably memory, but you really need to do some analysis before assuming that. For a Windows machine, I'd generally try to allow at least 512Mb for a Jira with up to 50 users and at least 2Gb just to run Windows, so your server may well be underpowered
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