Reddit user camarean shares a brief, but very useful iPad 2 iOS 8.1.1 review,
“So far I can say the performance is much smoother, although still not as smooth as iOS 7.1.2. It is getting pretty close though. I went as far as turning off reduced motion and still managed to get acceptable frame rates for the animations. The WiFi issue seems to be fixed, as I’m not having my connection dropped anymore. Memory mananagement also seems to have improved. Multitasking is more responsive. Safari is less laggy and I no longer have to deal with pages reloading whenever I switch tabs”