I've been playing around a little more -- first off, my tests from last night, at a distance of 65' from my router (with only that one exterior wall between me and it) I was consistently pulling down 55Mb/s/10 when rear of phone was squarely aimed in a direct line, centered with antennas on router. Merely rotating the orientation of my phone in space 90deg CCW dropped that to 30-35/9-10, same 65' out, my feet had not moved but to turn to the left and orient the right side of my phone (instead of back) towards the router. This seems to show, at least in this one small experiment, that the tiny iPhone antenna is extremely sensitive to orientation.
This could also mean that it's extremely sensitive to different cases (I have a rubberized Belkin), and potentially things like building surfaces/walls that aren't necessarily in the "direct" path between you and your router yet surround you and/or your router. My one test where I stood with my back towards my router (ie signal would have to go through or around my body) timed out standing at 65' - it wouldn't even initiate the speed test, but when I rotated 180deg it gets 50+Mb/s downstream all day long. So, our bodies are probably not in such close proximity on anything, even laptops, as they are with mobile phones & tablets, and it looks like they are pretty strong signal attenuators.
I downloaded a $.99 app called "Speedy Test" from the app store and its $2 obligatory desktop app you need to bounce back and forth off of. I strongly would not recommend anyone buy this program, it doesn't tell you the file size its sending, how its sending it, no RSSI value shown, you have to go and re-check your settings to confirm what actual SSID you were connected to, etc. But using a MacBook Pro plugged into my router via ethernet as the "destination", I tried all sorts of different distance and orientations to my N66 and usually got between 20-35Mb/s on 2.4ghz (but consistent over a longer distance) and 30-60Mb/s on 5ghz, with ping times between 1-3sec on 5ghz and 2-14sec on 2.4ghz. There was definitely a sweet spot several feet out from the router, at less than a meter or two it seems like the iOS device was getting blown out.
I also measured another AP (airport express) I have on the other side of house and got similar #s on both 2.4 & 5ghz. It was actually much more irregular in its result (comparing to Speedtest native app) you had to be completely stationary and held the phone in exactly the same orientation to the router to get consistent repeated test results.
I've posted spreadsheets on here before of my test results with different N66 f/ws then actually doing WLAN speed tests on my laptop, and have to say that using iOS WAN Speedtest app and "Speedy Test" WLAN/LAN speed checker that the wifi on the iPhone is far and away the most erratic and peculiar of any that I've tried to measure, but at the end of the day, with an antenna the size of maybe 60% full size stick of trident gum, it gets consistently 20+ Mb/s on either band which is enough to download songs quickly and stream at very good resolutions from Netflix, Amazon Instant, etc., and I personally use the Downcast podcast player and download almost nothing to the device (ie stream them all) several hours a day around home office with zero audio streaming dropouts. I've also used the "personal hotspot" mode on my iPhone 5 where it will share its LTE signal with my Mac over wifi and I can get really good performance doing it.
This is a really weird thing to try to measure in clean, repeatable, fair ways, so I'm just going to be happy with its good enough-ness as is, and switch to 5ghz if I need more bandwidth and can get a good enough signal from router since it does seem to be able to go significantly faster over 5ghz.
To show the iOS wifi as more of a provider than a user, here's the result from personal hotspot mode, running my Mac through my phone, 1 meter away, and my phone picked possibly the worst 2.4ghz channel, 1, (my N66U is on ch1, 15 feet away) to provide the "hotspot" with an LTE signal of -103 RSSI & 10Mhz bandwidth, RSRQ 140.5dB, RSRP 181.00 dBm.
