Yah.

A good suspension lets you go faster. To extend the analogy, every form of motorsports racing uses some kind of suspension -- from motorcycles on smooth paved circuits all the way up to the super-modified trucks racing the Baja 1000.

Now, I still prefer my bicycles to be relatively simple and elegant. Personally, I'm not into dual-suspension mountain bikes and the like. But I don't think that the small element of "suspension" that bigger tires provide is by itself a net detriment to speed, or much or a net detriment. (Again, not that speed needs to be the factor that we're all trying to optimize.)

I do think that bigger tires in the same wheel size can feel less responsive. You're adding mass at the outside of a wheel and rotational inertia is close to I=mr^2 for a spoked wheel. Ideally, I think that you want to drop down in wheel size as you go up in tire size so that you can accelerate at similar rates. Also, if you want to talk about a bike/tire/wheel being "responsive", you might want to decrease the trail and/or try to keep the wheelbase relatively constant. So: bigger tires, 650b to keep the overall radius similar and keep the wheelbase similar, a little bit more fork rake.

...does that sound familiar?

Or, on a more extreme scale, you might even want to drop down to 26" wheels if you want to go up to 48mm tires or bigger.