Exactly. Having a website load slowly is nothing compared to the insides of an Iranian torture cell. For more and more people, this is not a false dichotomy. Tor's speed is not the result of poor engineering; instead it follows from the properties a high-anonymity, low-latency network necessarily has. As users, before we complain about speed, we need to keep this in mind and consider whether we require such protection.
And I have absolutely no problem with that. I'm worried more about usability than convenience. My 3gs takes 6-7 seconds to load HN on 3g; how long would it take using the Tor browser? For someone on a GSM network? If I'm looking to coordinate protests in some oppressive sandy country, is it going to take me 90 seconds to open Twitter, write a tweet, and post it?
Again, I recognize that this is a fundamental consequence of onion routing and Tor is not intended to be used for everyday browsing. I simply wonder how it will handle a low-bandwidth, high-latency network.
Also, as a minor aside, are the mobile handsets themselves used as routing nodes? If not, what would be the consequence of adding a bunch of users to the system who don't participate in routing?
