Just want to distinguish between the two as I think they are separate problems.

Framerate / FPS / Lag:

Meaning how many frames per second you see. So for e.g in a smokey dungeon, or by big waterfalls the framerate drops considerably, meaning the gameplay is not smooth.
I would say Skyrim is very rarely ever at 30fps, from PC game experience, (where measuring FPS is possible,) I would say you are lucky to get 25fps but it can often be about 15fps on the ps3.

now STUTTERING on the other hand;

What I mean by this is when the game very breifly freezes, as it does when auto saving or loading new textures / areas whilst walking out in the wild for e.g. After playing for a number of hours, the game for me (and others?) starts to stutter horrendously in towns, basically the game becomes a slideshow. Is this everyones experience? the Framerate is just always bad but its the STUTTERING that gets worse by the hour?

The reason Im raising this is because I think the STUTTERING gets worse the longer you play the game. Whereas the framerate is always pretty bad (but that is to be expected in such a demanding game.

It's the stuttering that breaks the game. Its like a music CD that skips, a record that's stuck or a dvd that keeps freezing. THAT's the main thing Bethesda need to fix, as it is unnaceptable IMO.

i agree my game stutters horridly and im either not getting much of the so called fps drop or im to busy playing to notice it but i stutter so bad it breaks the game entirely for me

Technically... the sudden and sever loss of framerate is a stutter
The cause of this sudden drop is the problem we are all experiencing .. but yaknow... just saying.

I guess, technically it is. But Im just saying I'd call bad framerate 15fps whereas a 'stutter' is more like 1fps. Plenty of modern games have bad framerate on ocassaion but Skyrim is the only game I've ever played to 'stutter.' I just wanted to make sure we were all talking 'bout the same thing.