Impossibly great? I'm not saying everything responds instantly but usually there's either signal or there isn't.
AMP pages don't work offline just as much as regular internet
Not my experience at all. And even with good signal many heavy news sites take a long time to load.
For example this mobile speed test puts theverge.com at 21 seconds to load! That matches my experience. You can't tell me AMP is as slow as that. It's not even close.
https://gtmetrix.com/reports/theverge.com/Qli1RH8u
In my experience AMP pages load in 2-3 seconds, even with bad signal.
AMP is so much faster than 90% of websites 90% of the time I can see why Google push it so much.