Perhaps it's been a while since you've last used Tor, but at least in my experience, the speed really isn't that bad, especially for tasks that aren't time critical. Speeds of hundred or several hundred KB/s are not uncommon. The latency is a couple of seconds at most, in most cases. You won't be streaming in HD over Tor, sure, but fetching your email over Tor is not significantly more tiresome than over a direct connection. There is usually no noticeable lag for instant messaging either. YouTube video streams in the Tor browser also works with no delays most of the time.