If you have a moment, I'd love to know what you dislike about Google Images for iPad. I worked on the product when I was an intern at Google. I'm sorry it's causing you frustration :(
#2 is to view the meta data that's "free" on normal GI you have to click through to the preview and start downloading it and other images at a larger size. Images has lots of shitty, spammy websites gaming the results as well as poor versions of images available elsewhere larger, seeing that info was always useful to me.
Pro tip: If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you can view the desktop site by hitting "Classic". Happy Googling :)
Also when an image is being viewed, you can't swipe to go to the previous/next image. I believe this works on the iPhone.