Or will the performance of these systems evolve to support at least lower latencies
On latencies. I spent a while working in a stock exchange / brokerages as a programmer. We had clients who placed their servers in datacentres in Hawaii so they could trade off the speed of light margins between the west coast US and Japan/Asia markets.
Most of them would be paying a premium (by distance at the speed of light in fibre) as to how close their servers got racked in the data centre with the core stock exchange gateway in it. A 1 hop, 10 nano-second rack slot might cost you a million a month.
But the stock exchange and international markets are "Free, open and fair". Not really.