That's best-case. (Well, not really. Best case is that your disk isn't doing anything, the data is in one contiguous region, the head is in the right position, and the data is about to pass under the head.)

In actuality, it can be a lot worse. I've seen latencies of 500ms+ before, when the disk is in "seek hell". And right now my laptop has a median (!) latency of ~100ms. Mind you I'm listening to music and copying files in the background. But still.

It's kind of a hyperbole, granted, but most of our assumptions about disk access being faster rely on only one piece of software accessing that disk. With modern multi-core processors, pre-fetching and caching both at the application and the kernel level that assumption is quickly proven to be faulty.

10ms random seek is fine when you're only accessing one thing. But when multiple things are loading and alternating between locations it becomes significantly slower. Windows startup can be a pretty good indicator of this. I've got one system with an SSD (containing the OS) and a spinning platter drive for data. When I start it up, I have to wait for more than a minute before clicking anything or I end up with an unresponsive application for 3+ minutes. It still induces a quiet, resigned rage that such a powerful system can be nigh-crippled on boot.

I'm not sure about the "often" either, but I don't find it absurd. A full page nowadays has 20-30 files, which might not get cached sequentially, so you're talking about a bunch of seeks. If half need to wait for some other application to read its stuff, you're already talking about a big increase in latency; on the other hand, the connection tax is only paid once per hostname.