How far an electron can travel in a ns is a crazy limiter in computer science.
Now lets talk about actual processors instead of doing an analogy. 15cm per ns is more than enough to travel everywhere inside your CPU but the vast majority of logic is localized (usually signals stay in the same core). It's only awful if you go off package to DRAM or a second socket but then the budget is often higher than 1ns. Apple probably scores a lot of performance points here because the RAM is so close to the CPU.
Yes.
> Compare eg, wind speed (particles) versus the speed of sound (field).
Huh? The speed of particles in the air is even faster than the speed of sound.