1. Is it always as slow as it is right now? Or are they doing maintenance or something is happening that makes the cpanel take 3 minutes to load.
edit: now it's just one question. The first one is fixed.
You only asked one question....
I see two there.
It's not always as slow as it was; the problem is it's a free service being used by thousands of users, so when it gets busy, the server is stuck trying to serve pages to thousands of accounts, and if any of those pages happen to need a bit of processing to display (like a php based forum, or a php based game), it slows it down even more.
The -good- news is there's a High Resource Usage suspension script running, so if the slowness ISN'T caused by just a period of high-viewing and it's actually someone running something resource intensive, it suspends the account in question, bringing the load back down
But the short answer is no, it's not always this slow. If you're trying to do things at peak hours, it sometimes is, depending how many people are also trying to access the account or view a page that requires processing