iOS 5 upgrade issues

I updated my iPhone 4 yesterday to iOS 5. I just wanted to say, what a frustrating experience. I first did a system update on my mac to get the latest iTunes. I synced my phone to get all the photos and recent purchases off of it. Then when iOS 5 became available I went ahead with the update. iTunes took a backup of my phone and away it went. iOS 5 downloaded without any issue and once complete I went ahead with updating my phone. It seemed to be proceeding without any problems, it wiped out my phone and attempted installing iOS 5. During the "Verifying restore with apple" stage it failed to connect to the apple update servers and it took a turn for the worse. It seems apple was unprepared for the number of people trying to update on day one and the update servers were timing out. Because the update had started, I was left with a blank iOS-less phone, basically a pretty black paperweight. It took several attempts over several hours to finally get iOS 5 installed but the fun didn't end there.  Next was the restore of the backup that was taken just before the update process began.  This too failed (with error -34).  Several attempts seemed to solidify to me that the restore option was not going to work.  Fortunately I had synced and imported everything before I began so I wasn't really worried about losing any data. My phone was in a usable state, it just wanted me to do some preliminary setup.  So I went ahead with the setup but because it had only partially restored things all of my apps that were not bundled with the OS would crash.  I had already set up iCloud on my Mac and so I decided to just set up the phone and re-sync it from iTunes.  I had to reconfigure all my sync rules but after syncing everything seems to be working fine again.  The only complaint so far is that it doesn't let me sync contacts,etc. with both iCloud and Google.  I can see possible conflicts arising if trying to sync with multiple sources but it would be nice to have both...

A little frustrated and I still haven't had much time to appreciate having iOS 5.  So far all I can say is the new notification centre is nice and I'm not yet convinced having music and videos separated into two separate apps is the better way to go.