****my iPad is no longer an expensive paper weight****
Ok so....i rang support. was a total disaster. he told me to wipe the device as he couldn't get it to recover. Wish he had have asked me when my last back up was FIRST. Stupid. Anyway......
so i went into an apple store today - to express frustration to a genius at the bar (note they need to sell wine to make it a more relaxing experience).
The guy - felt sorry for him. I was there for 2.5 hours. Essentially had to strip the iPad bare. Install it like its a new device (i.e. no restore). Then tried to log in...no game centre. so we did a restore from last iCloud backup. Failed twice and took FOREVER. Quite literally last 2 mins took over 20 mins....til i got frustrated and left the store to do it at home. it looked like 99% chance a hardware fault had corrupted my backups.
so i did the restore again at home while i went out (expecting a disaster) -- come home to find it has restored. Quite a bit of data loss with a sync fail message......BUT game centre was back!!!! Hooray.
Give that apple guy a bottle of champers for his patience and persistence.
So try it.....please do a backup to your computer/time machine and iCloud to be sure.
Then wipe it and do a clean restore. I was sceptical. But it worked. Easy enough to redownload apps that didn't sync and i have my data backed up in documents apps so all sweet. Much happier.
Might still get a newer iPad though soon just in case its hardware related.