I asked the same questions as the OP. I didn't want to upgrade from iOS 5.1.1 because of all that I read regarding Maps, YouTube, battery life, bugs and sluggishness.
I did the update on my iPad 2 but kept my iPad 3 on iOS 5 just in case. And so far so good, no issues and battery life actually seems better for me with iOS 6.0.1 than with iOS 5.
The one thing I did was a hardware reset after the OS upgrade. Everything has been running great so far. I had Safari crash once on iOS 6 but can't say if was because of the new OS.
Only thing is that I don't really see the point. IOS6 doesn't really bring any new features to the ipad (save for siri and facetime over 3G on ipad3 and improved safari). Maps actually becomes worse. So I am not really any worse or better off updating. 😛