After playing it for about 5-8 hours in the last 2 days, I'd say for a casual gamer like me, there is no perceptible latency. Even in an FPS like Destiny. But again, yesterday was the first time I played a AAA game after two years so maybe I'm just a bit rusty.

You don't know what you're missing until you have tried lower latency.

My regular gaming setup is a 144 Hz monitor with a PC. Everytime I try gaming on a console with a 60 Hz TV I feel like I'm completely drunk because of the noticeable input lag. And that's not even cloud gaming. That's just the Console + TV input lag...

I think Stadia could be super cool for simulation games like Cities: Skylines. The lag isn't nearly as much of a problem and the ability to have an extremely powerful computer simulate many more "agents" would be fantastic.

Surprisingly, OnLive found lag was an even greater problem for applications with a cursor than for games.

Plus your suggestion can be implemented with cloud compute (a backend behind the UI) - it doesn't need to be cloud streaming.

No problem. Just reinvent X11 and let the display server render the cursor.

Your phrasing is dismissive but yes having a game not render its own cursor is pretty common and works quite well.

I think the experience will vary quite significantly, the surface is quite large. For Stadia launch, I created a crowdsourcing reports site and am hoping that we can get a better understanding through others' experiences.

https://www.cloudgamingdb.com/

Really? I played Witcher 3 with ping (to Paperspace machine) of about 40ms, the latency wasn't noticeable at all.