I had this issue since launch, and I probably should've asked a century ago, but better late then never.
It takes a very long time to load anything and everything and the performance is generally subpar.

Here's what I'm using:
Intel i7 duel quad core.
Graphics card: Radeon HD 6370M 1GB
4 GB Ram
It's a laptop

My C drive has 30 GB of total space, my E drive has 417. I installed Steam on my E drive, but Steam saves my files in my Documents folder.
The framerate is rarely smooth. It's playable, but it's not pretty. I wish I could be more specific-Is there a way to check ingame FPS?
The loading time when launching the game and fast traveling takes roughly 40-50 seconds. Sometimes over minute long until I start pressing space and escape, which seems to help. (It might be a coincidence)
I cannot run any games with shadows or antialiasing, so I always have those on minimal settings. I keep texture quality on high, which doesn't noticeably hinder the performance of any of my games.
It's to the point where I prefer playing on my old xbox because it simply runs better. It's guaranteed to work on a console. I'm getting tired of the time I have to drain on maintenance, but that's just me. Anyways, if someone has a clue I would most sincerely appreciate it.

Your E: drive is an external hard drive? If so that's the source of your problem. Anyway, loading screens take ages sometimes even for me (laptop, about the same as yours, games installed on the C: drive). Let's says that installing your games on an external hdd doesn't help.

My E drive is internal. I have a 500gb laptop, and I installed windows so my main drive is never used, thus it only has 30gb, although I guess I regret that decision, E is supposed to be shared with ubuntu, but I never use that os anymore because I can't play any modern games. It also takes up soo much of my time to figure out how to work the damn thing. I digress.

I'd upgrade this thing, but it's almost impossible to safely replace the graphics card. I guess I should get a tower with 8 or 16gb ram and a radeon 7k series to run Skyrim?

You don't need 8 go of ram to run the game, it uses barely 2 go, but you definitely need a good graphic card, at least 1 Gb of vram, and you already have one.

Ok, so the performance issue is my fault entirely. I'm playing on a tv and set the resolution higher than my computer normally runs on. I now set it to 1280x800 (lower than pcs normal settings) and it runs smoothly. It still looks skippy, but I can deal with it as long as it instantly reacts to my movement and aim. But the main issue still stands. It's a few seconds between cells, but fast traveling is still 30-50 seconds long, and launching the game takes over a minute. Is this normal?

Well, I wouldn't say that it's "normal" but I'm sure that most of us have this problem...

You could always install this mod http://www.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/21265

It won't help with speeding things up, but you can learn more about Elder Scrolls lore while you wait!

^Yes, I downloded a version of that in the past.

Off topic, but I found another strange issue. My screen flckers into a yellow screen and back to normal sometimes in first person. It happened after reloading the game after turning on anti aliasing. It goes away after a while, but my shout seems to trigger it. I'd rather not have a seizure so I'm turning that off now...

Tested it again, this time with Anti aliasing set on 4. It seemed to run perfectly fine, except for one incident. Instead of changing back and forth between first person, it happened for the duration of the shout. I saw a flash of red, yellow, maybe a light blue. My eyes hurt now, so I'm seriously going to keep it off from now on.