Of course you're missing out one option - perhaps they actually aren't actually that much slower, but you're just used to newer stuff being much faster. The definition of slow changes.
I'd go as far as to say that they need a new point-person in charge of their Cloud Services because whoever is doing it now is completely out of touch. iTunes in particular is embarrassing, and I personally buy less stuff because I don't want to run it (instead use Vudu, Amazon Digital, etc).