How well can rotation imitate gravity?

The main problem in a "rotational gravity" is that whenever you change the "height" of your centre of gravity, you gain or loose forward momentum. Angular momentum is conserved. So changing your "vertical"(radius in the rotation) will result in you automatically starting to move ahead or fall behind of the rotation of the floor. So falling might actually result in you slamming into the wall, instead of the floor :P

Edit: Come to think of it, running in one direction would make you weigh less, and running the other way you would weigh more. Maybe that is why Dave is grunting that much compared to jogging that slowly in 2001 :P

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Scifi like Mass Effect actually acknowledged this to some degree: http://i.imgur.com/snekDUE.jpg

But on the other hand you would run up and down stairs, or take elevators with no difficulties. Perhaps it was special stairs and elevators with mass effect fields? :P

Ever heard of the term “ficticious forces”? Well there ya go, you just described two of them. One is the centrifigual force, the one that keeps you pressed down onto the city. The other is the Coriolis Effect, which is just a term for the weird trajectories things make when they’re observed in a non-inertial reference frame. You may have heard these terms before. There’s also the centripetal force (it’s described in one of the links above), which isn’t ficticious as it involves the actual force required to change the velocity of an object.

Inertial reference frames and non-inertial reference frames can be pretty weird, but they actually make the math for the all of these observations, I don’t know, understandable? I think their concepts are really interesting.

Most designs for this have a very large wheel going slowly to compensate for the effect (and others) you describe.