Ryan, may I suggest that your demonstration has some fundamental flaws. Mainly, you cannot rely on Speeedtest to be an accurate measure of wifi signal integrity. Even after you release the corner, the Speedtest dial fluctuates wildly. Also, many Internet connections tend to throttle up over time. I didn't notice the wifi strength indicator on the iPad dropping.
A much better test would be to test only wifi on your LAN. You can do this by syncing the same file via iTunes onto your iPad, with wireless sync. Take an AAC file, or video clip, and time one without your hand in place, and one with your hand in place. This will correctly isolate the wifi LAN.
You need to understand, Speedtest measures the speed between your Internet connection and a Speedtest server. There are so many hops in between, which is why, even when you let go of the corner, it fluctuated quite a bit.
I would love to test this, but I have an iPad 2 and need to do some work (coding).
I will say, I never had a grip of death issue on my iPhone 4. My previous Samsung feature phone had a sticker on it, advising the user not to hold it "here" because it would attenuate the signal. This is true of most devices. That said, no matter how I hold my iPhone 4, I cannot reproduce the grip of death. Maybe my hands are too sweaty, or maybe Verizon CDMA holds a signal better (but wifi seems fine too).
I am not saying there is not a problem. I don't know. What I do know is that your test has flaws.
When I first used my iPad 2, almost a year ago, I had slower wifi, compared to my other computers. I did some research, and found that there are some changes to settings (dual band, the channel, etc) and that improved things greatly. In the end, I bought an Airport Extreme. While pricey for a wifi router, it is "da bomb". But I think any decent 802.11n wifi router should work fine. That said, my AE pumps out far more signal than any 802.11n wifi router I have used. I can actually use my wifi connection on my iPhone 4, with 2 "bars" when I am outside my condo building, in the courtyard, about 700 feet away. On the contrary, a Belkin wireless N wifi router I bought for an unappreciative family member, could barely pass its signal to the other end of the house, not even 300 feet away, in a home with an open floor plan...
Apple is not perfect, but better than any other company out there. I have used all sorts of software and hardware in my long career as an enterprise software developer. The fact that every collegue I know has an iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and most Silicon Valley companies are giving their developers Macs speaks volumes. My friend's wife is an Android developer (works on MotoBlur) and she uses a Mac. I can't count the tears before bedtime when I tried to use IBM RAD 7 on a brand new DELL laptop with Windows. I gave up and used a text editor and ANT scripts.
But by all means, be critical, but make sure you have the facts and the right tests. Also, coming off half cocked like this is a fata design flaw, when you don't have all the facts, is not helpful. Save your judgements for after all the facts are gathered. It could very well be a design flaw. It could be a software issue. It could be your wifi router. It could be a lot of things.
It could be the fact that websites get a lot of hits and ad revenues when they post a story about a "huge flaw" with a successful Apple product. No one seems to care that, for example, the Nexus S would reboot itself during phone calls. Continually. People who write about Apple flaws will guarantee to get hits on their website or blog, and some dollars in their pocket.
For example, after iOS 5 came out, I heard about all these battery issues. I still charged my iPhone 4 once every 2-3 days. With this wifi issue, I read comments from people with iPad 3's that say the wifi works just fine. It may be something that affects a few users, like the battery issue.
Anyway, I have to get back to much more important things. I don't think this is newsworthy at all. When a company makes something that is 100% perfect, that is newsworthy, because it is simply not possible.
