Love my iPad 3.
To fix the problems you are having just register a US iTunes account and buy vouchers to reload. I didn't even bother creating a SA based account as I did the research before even buying the device. Bought some sick EA games the other day for 99c (R8).
As for customization, I think we will have to wait a little longer. There are very few retina enabled themes available for Dreamboard and Winterboard but more will come. Downloaded one the other day that looks exactly like Gingerbread, it is excellently done but I won't use it because it doesn't auto-flip when switching orientation and only has horizontal mode. There are however widgets for it which look pretty sweet.
Here is a link for some current themes, but I think they are all pretty sucky (except the first one is okayish):
http://jailbreakcity.com/home/5-new-...-the-new-ipad/
You're going to love the Plex app

Way prettier than the Android flavour in my opinion.
Also a great thing is to have Airplay available for all media on the ipad without the need for an external app. I use this all the time to stream to my xbmc box and it's awesome!
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