If you have 90 minutes with nothing else to do I highly recommend giving the launch event with Jay Leno a watch.. it's really something unique. https://youtu.be/_JzfROUDsK0
Obviously some of this is for show, but even still it indicates people cared about having a very smooth and snappy user experience back then and that it was absolutely important to showcase performance. Somewhere along the way developers just quietly agreed that latency is the user's problem.
It wasn't really Windows' fault. It was well optimized. Machines of that era were just really slow.