The latency can be significant for TOR, as your connection is bounced through various hosts all over the world. This prevents a single country from putting all the pieces together. This is what you notice while browsing.
The raw bandwidth on the other hand is usually pretty good (not great, but it's not intended for large downloads anyway as they tax the network...).
TOR is meant for the cases when anonymity trumps convenience.
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?
The raw bandwidth on the other hand is usually pretty good (not great, but it's not intended for large downloads anyway as they tax the network...).
TOR is meant for the cases when anonymity trumps convenience.