So the latest update isn’t all sunshine and kittens: it’s nowhere near as soul eating as iOS 6 was when I found what had happened to the Maps, but it has many more rough edges than I’d have expected, given that the Android experience on the Nexus 7 has been pretty impressive so far.
First up, the lack of Over The Air auto update: as found online in multiple places, you can force a real OTA check by going to Settings > Apps > Running > Google Services Framework and pressing Clear Data. A pain, but hey, it saved having to grab the SDK and use adb.
The next, more serious issue is the huge lagginess of the tablet after the update. Resorting to the Developers menu (enable this via Settings > About Tablet and tap Build Number seven times) to enable the onscreen CPU monitor (top) shows that after 5 minutes locked and without screen display I was getting a load of 3.5 which dropped to 0.1 when idling at the main launcher page. Bad, but not awful.
Add a new user, log out and then turn the screen off for 1 minute and the load at the lock screen was up at 68.3… WTF ? The last time I saw that load on a Unix box it was a 400MHz UltraSparc IIe with a mailq in exim of over 8000 items.
Looking at the top items running and also going on anecdotal evidence online, I deleted all the MP3 files on my machine without much improvement, but removing the 1.4GB MP4 movie after the music seems to have cleared things up. Previously not a single app could be run as a secondary user without a timeout dialogue box appearing, and now my system load is under one for the majority of the time.