> Is it indicating that the router is faster at forwarding packets than responding to ping requests?

Exactly this. In most “real” routers, forwarding (usually) happens in the “data plane”. It’s handled by an ASIC that has a routing table accessible to it in RAM. A packet comes in on an interface, a routing decision is made, and it goes out another interface - all of this happens with dedicated hardware. Pings (ICMP Echo requests), however, get forwarded by this ASIC to a local CPU, where they are handled by software (in the “control plane”).

You’re really seeing different response times from the two control planes - one may be more loaded or less powerful than another, regardless of the capacity of their data planes.