And a connection speed of only 1-3mbps (very realistic in many hotels across the western and eastern world, from someone [me] who spends 4/7 nights a week in hotels for work), where streaming reliably isn't possible or the iPad caches are too insignificant to maintain the stream well enough
I agree - the last hotel I stayed in was in a semi-rural location and I could not get 4G on my iPhone. Even so, the pitifully slow 3G I was getting was still around five times faster than the hotels wifi - even though their router was located just outside the door to my room. The figures I got from speedtest.net were simply laughable. In the end I just switched wifi off as it kept trying to take priority over cellular. As I have a 'wifi only' iPad, that just stayed in my bag.