It's hard to beat local compute for latency.

Absolutely. One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

It's surprising how much latency a human will tolerate without notice, however.

>One could even make a decent claim that (barring some truly ancient hardware between input, CPU, and monitor / audio circuits) it's impossible.

I think that's only if we ignore monitor refresh rates. Most of us are maxed at 60 FPS which with a lot of hand waving is equivalent to ~17 ms latency. It's relatively easy to get a network with latency better than that. If you can achieve the rendering + data round trip in under 17 ms you're going to be functionally equivalent to a local computer.

Funny, I have around 90ms latency to Google (from my home fiber). So, no, their network doesn't really address it in reality.

Just because you have bad latency doesn't mean everyone else does.

Given that I'm running fiber that connects to the local university backbone, I'm running the fastest possible link in my area (excepting those in the university).

So, I'd say that I'm running the best case scenario available within my area.

That's not accurate. A university is a relatively small population and not something that Google will necessarily optimize for. And there's no guarantee that the university isn't doing something wrong that is artificially increasing latency.

My anecdata counterpoint is that I pay for the cheapest/slowest broadband available in a midsized city and my ping to google.com is 14ms.

My ping to google.com is 9 ms at home and around 5 ms at work.