Really. Are you on a particularly challenged connection? I just tried exactly that test and could barely get anything typed at all before the page display was finished. And it certainly didn't miss any characters. Obviously there is a lot more content on the page now than there was a few years ago, but AFAICT they've hidden it exceedingly well.
Honestly, the above seems like pretty bald hyperbole to me.
I have this happening regardless of connection speed (right now speedtest.net shows 6.55 Mbps). It's not only about speed though, you have 15 tabs open and google.com loads slower. Before it wasn't a problem, but now there's that brief moment sometimes when the page is loaded, but doesn't work yet.
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).
You may find this hard to believe but, there are places that exist that are not America.
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.
You do know that your Google searches don't go to Mountain View, right? Google has datacenters all over the world. I think you know better, and I'd love to see some actual numbers from you.
Honestly, the above seems like pretty bald hyperbole to me.