The UI is an abomination, I have great difficulty doing anything. But as far video conferencing, in my experience the video and audio is grainy and brutal, you can call the very same person using Facetime and it is crystal clear. And when there is a temporary drop in bandwidth (I assume that is the cause), rather than dropping the high-bandwidth video resolution slightly, it seems to cut the low-bandwidth audio completely.

I'm not GP, but the few handful of times I've Skyped to other countries the experience has varied from kind-of-ok to horrible.

Maybe it's a location thing? I'm in Scandinavia..

I do Australia/UK regularly without problem. It seems to be very dependant on the participants network connections, not surprisingly. It doesn't seem to recover from temporary network issues fast enough.