How can I get a mouse cursor in qemu?
It turns out all I had to do was to add -show-cursor to the command line. Additionally I found that adding -enable-kvm reduced the bootup time from 10 minutes to 45 seconds. This version works:
qemu-system-x86_64 -show-cursor -enable-kvm -cdrom ubuntu-14.04.3-desktop-amd64.iso -m 2048
I find it a bit puzzling why this is not turned on by default.