It’s never fast enough until people can’t tell the difference. “Pretty fast” is meaningless in that context. What matters is whether it is perceptibly faster or slower.
I think the real issue is something that Google is not telling us.
Maybe most people can't figure out they can press cursor down + return.
Or maybe this is a flashy way to distinguish their product from the competition.
Or maybe this is a way to encourage users to use shorter queries (as they can see how effective they are from the search results), thus forcing advertisers to pay more for more general terms.
Even those who can figure it out probably benefit from fewer necessary steps, allowing them to pay less attention to the process of searching and more attention to the content.
I actually like Google Instant a lot. If I don't know exactly what I'm looking for - lets say I'm looking up some obscure HRESULT error handling thing, which I was - I can basically play with my query in real-time. It makes it much faster to do this kind of digging.
