Quick update, all - I've been in touch with one of the MS Support staff over the last week, and we've been troubleshooting the issue via remote control.
The tech has sighted and logged the issue - at the time the device was connecting between 6-50 mbps, on average around 30 mbps on a 2.4ghz corporate network. After some basic troubleshooting (checking driver versions, device status, etc.) he collected some logs, which I'm told will be passed onto the Surface product team. He should hopefully get back to me in a week or so with word from the product team.
I'm hoping that this will result in a fix during the next round of firmware updates... Pretty fed up at this point.
I just got my SP3 a few hours ago. I just found this forum after noticing this same thing max 72Mbps, after seeing my network being so slow, I ran windows update and moved about my house. I am now currently seeing speeds of ~113Mbps; my new MSI gaming laptop with Qualcomm killer wi-fi network is seeing ~300Mbps on the same network. What gives Microsoft!?!
My current driver is 15.68.3066.135