Same here on the iPad 1. One thing I noticed is when playing a game, if the notification center shows me that I got a new email, everything slows downs for a few secs, and quite often, the game will crash. Actually not just games, Safari did crashed also...
I am currently checking the different behaviors with and without gestures... But I think I'll do the same with and without the notification center...
I disabled the gestures for a few days and all was good. Then enabled them again, and it's been 5 days and starting to have to random crash again...
VicoPad addict!