As for scrolling in the browser: I reprogram Opera to use the D-pad as page down, page up instead of down, up, and then it's as smooth and fast as you wish.

Compared to my Palm T3 the difference is that every Palm program starts instantly, while an N800 program can take a second or so (sometimes a bit more for programs that start accessing the network at the same time as they start up, e.g. the email reader).
This is no wonder, as Palm programs start directly from RAM while N800 programs has to be loaded from internal (flash) storage. If you leave them up (iconized) they "start" as quickly as Palm programs (naturally, because now they're in RAM).

Thank you everybody for the information. You've pretty much confirmed what I'd guessed -- that the N800 is a work in progress.

From what you've said and reviews I've read (and YouTube videos I've watched), it sounds like the N800 really could benefit from a faster processor. If history is anything to go by, the N800 successor should feature a faster chip. It sounds like even a boost of 100MHz will be a big improvement for Javascript-heavy pages.

Bearing in mind that I'm planning to get this for Xmas, it makes a lot of sense to wait and see what Nokia announce closer to December.

It's always a balance between CPU performance and battery capacity. Higher CPU performance translates directly to higher battery drain. I would'nt like to lose the great battery performance of the N800 just to get a faster CPU, when the CPU in almost everything I do performs very well. It doesn't feel sluggish in normal operations. Flash sites _can_ be a bit slow now and then. The biggest HW problem of the N800 is really that the bandwidth to the screen is a bit strangled (the 770 is actually better in that respect), not the CPU.