[Nexus 7 General] br0adband:
Every device lags, every damned device lags, so don't believe the hype, especially from Apple - they're the big dog on the block and they love preaching how smooth and fluid their interface and mobile OS is, which lags like molasses in winter when you try and scroll left to the Search screen, every time, on every device they've ever made, without fail.

All I'll say is this: when I got this Nexus 7 a little over a week ago it had the factory 4.1 on it, then I updated to 4.2.1 and wasn't really that impressed because it suffered from lag that was more than noticeable to me (having used portable devices and mobile OSes for over 20 years, I notice it instantly on any device always). I got rid of the pure stock ROM and tried the CM 10.1 and it was noticeably better as expected, but still some lag, so then I started looking at custom kernels.

franco.Kernel helped out significantly, and then M-Kernel did as well but the lag was still there for the most part exactly in the same places (scrolling primarily) and opening certain apps.

Then 4.2.2 update patch came out and I had it within maybe an hour of the N7 Wi-Fi ROM appearing and installed it and the very first thing I noticed was it booted the N7 like 5x faster - on 4.2.1 it would take about 15 seconds or so to see the Google logo appear, with 4.2.2 that happens in 3 seconds now. The full boot on 4.2.1 took roughly 45-50 seconds, now it takes 27-30 consistently.

Everything is better with 4.2.2, including battery life (that means the pure stock ROM/kernel) because of improvements Google now has in effect - they even updated the product specs to say 10 hours of active use instead of the previous 8 hours so they're confident enough in this new 4.2.2 version to do that publicly with the product specs.

4.2.2 is better, period. It brings back almost all the "butter" as far as I'm concerned, but right now I'm using Paranoid Android 3.0 and M-Kernel a37 and getting fantastic battery life as well as snappy fast responsive performance - and that's just from using two cores which is the default with M-Kernel these days. If I bump it to all 4 things just get even more buttery (if that's even a word, geez).

I'm happy with this device, I can't comprehend why some people aren't, really. And no it's not just because of what I paid for it - it's because I've used most every mobile or handheld device in the past 20 years and this one is plain and simple awesome. :D

Also, the only way someone can say something is slow is if they have something to compare it with - if all you'd ever seen or used in your life was that Nexus 7, you'd most likely think it was working just fine, but apparently something you've used or seen in action gives you a baseline to say "Wow, that's fast, my Nexus 7 can't do things that fast, it's not that smooth and snappy..." so, I ask you: what exactly are you comparing your Nexus 7's performance with, are you using benchmarks with actual numbers or are you simply staring at it when you open something and say "That's slow..." ?

It's entirely possible your Nexus 7 truly is defective in some respect(s), I can't say for sure, but I'd be interested in seeing something in terms of concrete numbers - and I don't mean Quadrant which is utter BS for "benchmark." Use something like Antutu for overall performance, Vellamo for HTML/browsing testing, and AndroBench for storage benching and then post some results for comparison.