This is why I still have a soft spot for the original MacOS (before OSX). The hardware was 1000x slower but it felt faster in that it responded instantly to user inputs. And that's because the OS was built from scratch as a nearly hard realtime OS. They built it that way because they had to: The RAM was so small and the hardware so limited they didn't have the luxury of seventeen layers of API cruft between every mouse click and something changing on screen.

People put up with slow responses today because many programmers are simply unaware that instantaneous response architectures are possible.