Random anecdote: Was told by a trader a few years back that one trading desk had both Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters systems next to one another and once they were able to capitalise on Bloomberg being a few seconds faster to make a net gain.
Having a Reuters and Bloomberg terminal on the desk next to each other is commonplace, I did have, plus a Datastream.
As for a few seconds delay, that's probably how they're interacting with them, not how they could use them. Both have both very different UIs and very different Excel plugins (assuming someone has both on their desk, from experience, they probably use the Excel plugins a lot/mission critical functionality).
