You are correct that SEO people would latch onto the idea and start producing faster sites. But so will many legitimate sites that want to provide a good user

You are correct that SEO people would latch onto the idea and start producing faster sites. But so will many legitimate sites that want to provide a good user experience. Is that really so bad? I think that site speed does correlate with a better user experience. A site that loads quickly shows that the person who made it cares about my experience more than a bloated site that takes forever to load. I will admit that it's certainly not as as strong an indicator as the content, inbound links and other factors that are rumored to be part of PageRank but speed does matter. All other things being equal, I would much rather visit a site that loads in 2 seconds than one that loads in 20 seconds.