You must understand that throughput is only part of it. Your response times are horrible which will hurt actual browsing speeds. I've got 2 bars right now and browse speeds of about 1.8Mbps down but I'm getting 99ms response times. This feels so much faster then previous speeds at full bars.
The highest upload speed I ever got on 3G with my 3GS was like .2 or .3 MBPS up. This is a huge improvement. I'm anxious to see what I get late tonight.
While holding the dreaded left lower corner (actually had my hand wrapped all the way around the bottom and sides of the phone). Did several with it touching the area and several without. My "change" in speed over the 4 tests were no more than 1200 kbps. That was between 2 different tests while NOT touching the "bad" area.