AP systems have some useful properties, but they're also (typically) more difficult to reason about.
The "hiccups" you describe are periods of unavailability. The increased latency is caused by an element of the system waiting for the data to become available again, a totally valid strategy for coping with transient failures/partitions.
Your argument about intra-datacenter partitions being unlikely are true, but they do happen. You also make a good point about such partitions also affecting client applications. Both of these are indicative of CP systems and, like I said: there's nothing wrong with that.
Personally, I think both AP and CP distributed systems are equally interesting. What I consider a red flag is attempting to rationalize how a system "beats CAP".