There have been several studies / surveys done on advertised speed vs actual speed, and the vast majority of people reported getting close to what they're supposed to. To add my own personal anecdote to the mix, I'm something of an internet geek (I work for Cisco), so I usually test the speed wherever I'm at. Every home connection I've tried has been solid.

As for technological apologism, I'm definitely guilty of that, and have no problem admitting a bit of bias. I do think that history has, thus far, supported my position, though. There were a loooooot of disgruntled internet users, back in the day. Connections were slow, unreliable, sites were poorly designed, buggy, service was expensive. . .the list goes on. That's kind of the phase we're in now, with cloud computing. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it will never be perfect, and I think it will be a very long time before hobbyists stop maintaining their own computing setup. But I definitely think we'll see comfortable, functional, pleasant cloud computing go mainstream before too much longer. The advantages are real and proven; we just have to figure out the right implementation. We (as a collective society) have, over the long run, usually done a pretty good job with that.