You can hide the loop by using arrayfun() or cellfun() or the like, but those are convenience functions that will loop internally.
"for" and "while" are the only two basic repetition structures in MATLAB.
You could construct a recursive function to do the looping implicitly, but that is unlikely to be any faster.
The most common cause of slow loops is a failure to preallocate space for the outputs, which (until 2011b anyhow) results in the new memory having to be continually allocated, old memory copied to new, old memory deallocated. That can be very bad for performance.
"for" loops have not been especially slow for several years, and in modern versions can be faster than vectorizing. It is what is in the body of the for loop that can be slow.
You should consider using the profiler to find out where you program is slow.
