Ive had that exact same feeling since my iPad 1's life was effectively ended by software updates. It was the quickest device to become obsolete I've ever owned.
I inherited one after never owning a tablet. I was able to turn it into a Plex video-viewing device after jailbreaking and figuring out what the latest supported version of Plex is and it works great for that.
Of course for web browsing in general it's pretty unusable.
As someone who had to develop for that thing - it was underpowered from day 1. iPhone 3GS hardware with 5x the number of pixels to push and higher expectations on software capability? It was never going to work.
Of course for web browsing in general it's pretty unusable.