I installed iOS5 on my iPad and iPhone4

Perhaps I was a little too excited, but I started to download and install iOS5 on my iPad (original iPad) within minutes of it being launched last Wednesday (12/10/2011). In retrospect, this was a mistake.

The download was very slow. Although, initially the "time remaining" was given as 12 minutes, this kept steadily increasing until it eventually reached about 40 minutes. Twitter was reporting many people complaining about very slow downloads at the time so next time I'll wait a day or two.

The install was eventually complete (about 90 minutes) without any reported errors.
However, in fact a lot was wrong. None of my music or videos were present on the iPad and, on my 32 GB drive, 20GB were taken up with Others. Indeed, iTunes reported that I was 16 GB over-capacity. First time I'd ever come across that.

Of course, very rarely, if ever, will your problem be unique to you and this post deals with exactly what I experienced. However, syncing through iTunes, as recommended here, did not help me.
Nevertheless, this forum post and this one described more precisely my problem without, however, indicating a precise solution.

After much trial and error, what worked for me was to uncheck ALL of my iPad apps in iTunes, while checking all of the music and videos I wanted on the iPad. Now, the sync worked fine. However, of course I was now without any of my purchased (and free) apps. But, this just required checking what I wanted in iTunes and re-syncing.

In contrast, I waited until today (15/10/2011) to upgrade to iOS5 on my iPhone4 and this went very smoothly in about 40 minutes. No problems whatsoever.

Now, were the problems I had with the iPad install due to bad downloads because of pressure on Apples servers or are there bug in iOS5? Difficult to know with precision but next time, I think I'll curb my impatience and wait at least a day.