I have worked over ssh over internet connections with satellite-class latency and I can say it is painful. (Emacs shell mode can help)
You probably think that 'the web' is a high latency application. It probably should be, and maybe it was in 2000. Since then, web developers have gotten into the habit of using AJAX indiscriminately, plus they feel pressured to add features such as customized fonts, advertising, third party tracking, etc. I am not sure if CDN is really a net positive when a web site might need to do 30 DNS lookups because it uses 30 CDNs. It just takes one of those lookups to be slow to obliterate the savings from the CDN. CDNs might help with the median, even the average load time, but I am not sure they help the 95% load time which is what causes customer pain.
Add up all those round trips and the overhead of access control (maybe those patents on slotted ALOHA for satellite applications have expired by now) and you are talking upwards of 0.5 sec and it doesn't take many round trips for that 0.5 sec to turn into 5 to 10 seconds.
Worst thing is that people who are developing locally or from places with fast connections to the data center will think these apps are really fast.