If you have s voice enabled, there's a bit of lag between pushing the home button and getting back to the home screen because it's waiting for you to hit the button again, perhaps a bit too long IMHO.
The S pen also definitely lags, not a whole letter behind or anything, but you can see the input trailing behind you as you draw it, which doesn't surprise me all that much. Adding a note: None of the apps are designed to be used by a stylus: All included apps can be used with your fingers or your stylus, even the s note app. Drawing on PDFs (with the latest version of adobe reader) kicks ass, and the handwriting recognition is really surprisingly good. I'm not even trying to be an android fanboy there, it's ****ing good. I would have expected an iPhone to have that kind of handwriting recognition if it had n-trig stylus capability, which is a damn shame it doesn't. It's a huge disappointment that the iPad doesn't have it! Imagine the note taking capabilities! The fat pens suck!
Seriously Apple, the iPad needs a stylus. Then I could actually use the damn thing in engineering classes and I'd buy one without question. Until then I don't want one.
As far as catching app lag, like having a list not scroll 100% smoothly, I have seen that once while quitting an app (the transition appeared to not be 100% smooth) - kinda surprised me, but it was the Safeway Just4U app, which has been known to spontaneously crash on everyone I know. XD I'm kinda laughing at the fact I remember that!
I think the note 2 makes a really nice phone though, quite the opposite of what was said earlier in this thread. The handset speaker is really good, the proximity sensor works really well, and the in-call control is fantastic. Samsung even ripped apple's green status bar (while in call) off and that worked fairly well I might add XD
What was really bad about the Note 2 was the out of the box experience. For starters, they botched up the plastic wrap the phone was in - it looks like they just didn't wrap the phone all the way and stuffed it in the box such that the wrap was all kinked up on the bottom. I thought I had a used phone for a moment, but it was spotless and several others that ordered it on slickdeals had mentioned similar.
That said, the touchwiz "new phone" wizard is bloat, and so are at least 5-6 apps that came with the phone. Oh yea, and the samsung keyboard sucks - swiftkey 3 works MUCH BETTER, but then you have to switch back to the samsung one if you want to draw things. The problem with the samsung one is that it works great and has a 5th row of just numbers, really fantastic, but the moment you start typing on it, it shrinks to one-handed mode and there's no way to make it get back easily without digging into a menu to turn that off.
To finish on a more positive note: The popup s notes (if you take the pen and hold its button and tap the screen twice, you'll get one) and the popup browsers are super cool, and kinda take a peek at what I'm hoping to see more of in the future: THE ABILITY TO HAVE OVERLAPPING WINDOWS ON PHONES AND TABLETS! YES!
I admit it. I'm a frigging viking. I want to see a more easily accessible filesystem and overlapping windows as an option on phones and tablets. Squee!