My laptop pulls 280 Mbps according to fast.com. Switching to wired gives me 700 Mbps so I guess the difference is between a forty minute wait and a 15 minute wait, but either way it's fast enough that I'll take the convenience of not having to lay cables.

I imagine everyone else feels the same way: mostly limited by the upstream. If I had 100 Mbps Internet, there'd be no difference, for instance.

You fail to account for the shitty wifi chipset in the PS4, no way you're getting 280Mbps over wifi on a PS4. Even wired downloads max out at around 300Mbit, even though I easily get 900+ mbit on e.g. a speed test.

That assumes you get 300Mbps internet. A common max in Germany is 50Mbps, many people are still stuck with 16Mbps. 100Mbps and more are comparatively rare. Wifi speed is not the restricting factor, even with the PS4s chipset.

Sounds like a shitty situation for Germans, but here stateside cable ISPs have been offering 100+Mbps plans for a few years, and Telcos like Verizon ran fiber to quite a bit of their footprint. Gigabit is increasingly available, especially in urban areas.