Honestly, a lot of people could get a lot faster sites if they just put the time and effort towards making them fast. It's not even that difficult, but most don't know or care to make the changes.
Google is doing a lot to make this stuff easier, but there are plenty of things holding us back, mostly it's lack of care to make things fast by the average website.
As a result page loads take at least a couple seconds on a good connection, but a 5-10 second page load isn't unheard of.
This is what we did for our own site to make it fast: http://retromocha.com/learn/how-we-made-our-website-fast/
Honestly, a lot of people could get a lot faster sites if they just put the time and effort towards making them fast. It's not even that difficult, but most don't know or care to make the changes.
Google is doing a lot to make this stuff easier, but there are plenty of things holding us back, mostly it's lack of care to make things fast by the average website.