You're correct that the theorem doesn't address latency requirements. There are all kinds of things it doesn't address. The point of it is simply as you say - you must give up consistency to have availability in the face of a partition, or vice-versa. Some vendors of distributed systems would have us believe otherwise. This theorem gives us a framework to understand at a very basic level the trade-offs that must be made in distributed system implementations. That isn't really very much for as much airtime as it got, which I suspect is what your contention is with.