Samsung made official statements that they were aware of possible issues and looking at possibilities of fixing it. To the best of my knowledge, their attempts never succeeded. It was not a specific handset problem...it was a problem with the phone in general, and I just assumed they'd fix it.

Right. When I first tested it.. it kind of worked. It was probably slow then too, but I didn't have much to compare with at the time. As I started using it more regularly later on it became more clear it was slow and that sometimes it didn't work at all. There was tons of talk about this on various forums... there was some fixes released and I always assumed this would get fixed in an later update. But time and updates went by and it never got good. Then it was too late to return the phone. If they even would have accepted a "sometimes very slow GPS" as a return-argument in the first place.