This sounds more like an internet connection issue than anything. Either your tablet has a poor connection or the server is down. The second is rare, but possible. I've had this happen various times and restarting the device helped.
Seems like a year ago would have been the best time to decide you needed some other device to meet your needs. At least you could have sold it for most of your money then and bought something that suited you better. No one here can fix this for you other than paying what the device is now worth if you put it up for sale now.

As others have mentioned, you have to pay attention to how much is running on the device as it has pretty limited RAM. If you have a couple programs running, bluetooth, wifi, several desktop widgets, etc you've pretty much maxed out the stock 128MB ram on the system. This was the most any system like this had up until recently. You seem to want to compare this device to a desktop or notebook and really ought to be comparing it to a palm or win mobile device (which only allow you to run one program at once). Besides, why should enabling swap "blow (your) mind to bits? I can't imagine you've ever run a computer before that with a full featured internet browser or video conferencing that even attempted to not use swap. I've got a decently new desktop and I wouldn't even want to try either of these tasks without swap (and especially if it only had 128MB or RAM).
Are you trying to use your device indoors by any chance? Very few gps devices work well in doors. Mine tends to behave as you describe indoors, but is able to go hours and hours on trips without losing it's GPS fix. It does take a bout 5-10(max) minutes to establish a fix if I have gone a significant distance from the location of my last fix. You don't really need to fix the problem you are describing. AGPS only helps you establish an initial fix faster. If you keep dropping losing your fix, AGPS won't help because your device should already have a general idea of where you are located from the last fix.
Not so much lower standards, but reasonable expectations. I expect the device to have limitations similar to a 2 year old pocket PC or Palm pilot. Why? Because that's about the age of the hardware it uses. I don't expect it to have the performance of even a netbook, because those devices have significantly more power than the N8x0 devices do and therefore significantly shorter battery life and significantly heavier batteries. The device is actually able to do amazing things with what it is. I mean, it can do what desktop PC's couldn't do less than 10 years ago and still fits in your pocket. So, realizing that it has limitations, I tend to only run 1 or 2 programs at a time, and close any applications or widgets that I'm not using.

If you follow my advice and it doesn't do "half the things it says..." then something is definately wrong with your device. As an aside, I'd imagine that the video calling software policy is more related to legal issues than Nokia trying to rip you off. I've never seen a computer that comes with Skype or Gizmo preinstalled (there may be computers out there, but none that I know of.) Most use a similar model to the N8x0 models which simply supply a link to an installer which adds the program.
Now all you want is just one of the features... In that case, I think you'd have to concede that the advertisements include flash, bluetooth, and linux. You've conceded that bluetooth works. I know from experience that flash does. And the system is, as advertised, a linux OS called Maemo.
If you can't get it to do what you want, put a price on the device and put the thing up for sale. You won't get all of your money back, but at least you'll get some of it (which is far better than losing all of your money on something you don't want because you're too stubborn).