Honestly, the above seems like pretty bald hyperbole to me.
Even worse with Instant Search on, and you can't disable it in your account—it seems to be saved in cookies independently, so you'd have to regularly visit Search settings.
It was quite distracting when I used google.com (now, I usually search via Chrome's omnibar).
We like to call this "The rest of the world". It's nice and there are many friendly people.
Now let's take an example of a place in the rest of the world:
Perth, Australia.
What's the flight time of a packet from Perth to Mountain View? 300ms -400ms? Taken each way that's almost a second.
Hyperbole? not at all.
You may now continue living in total oblivion to the world around you.
Also you say they've hidden the extra content. The same extra content which was just more ads. You're actually making the contention that google was cleverly hiding all the ads from you?
No it wasn't. It was cleverly pushing real results below the fold where they will stop distracting users from the ads.
see this: http://www.seobook.com/excuse-me-where-did-googles-organic-s...
This is only heading in one direction - "Pay up for adwords or you're on page two, buddy".
You do realize that Google doesn't have a datacenter in Australia, right?
Our searches go to California, so I think the OP's point about the round trip time to Mountain View are reasonable.
I'm not in Perth (which - to be fair to Google - is the most isolated city in the world), but from Adelaide my timings look like this:
GET http://www.google.com.au/s?hl=en...
Waiting: 205ms
Receiving: 218ms
Total: 423ms
Having said that, I usually get results before I can press Enter.