It's not just that... The delay is there to allow you lift your finger and see the link turned gray (or whatever the selection color is). This feedback is cruc

It's not just that... The delay is there to allow you lift your finger and see the link turned gray (or whatever the selection color is). This feedback is crucial even in cases where you tapped on the right thing--how else would you know you got the right thing? There are valid reasons to override this, but developers and designers should be sure that their tap targets are huge when they do. Otherwise they're depriving users of a pretty important piece of feedback.