Delay an angular.js $http service

Interesting question!

As you mentioned yourself, $timeout is the most logical choice for a delayed call. Instead of having $timeout calls everywhere, you could push a response interceptor that wraps the $http promise in a $timeout promise, as conceptually outlined in the documentation of $http, and register it in one of your configuration blocks. This means all $http calls are affected by the $timeout delay. Something along the lines of:

$httpProvider.interceptors.push(function($timeout) {
    return {
        "response": function (response) {
            return $timeout(function() {
                return response;
            }, 2500);
        }
    };
});

As a bonus to your “to simulate a bad connection?”, you could reject or do absolutely nothing randomly, too. Heh heh heh.