Latency is a huge deal for some.
Hey Simon, love your "span planet with cloud at acceptable latency" club, and I'd like to stress its importance. I work at GenieDB, and we distribute a single database over multiple cloud providers in multiple regions. Through our experience, a user may sometimes expect latency (if they know that they're overseas), it is not acceptable for games of all kinds (mobile/PC/console), especially those that use a single database in different regions (we have use-case). Well, thanks to Google, GenieDB also switched on support for the two new Asia Pacific Google Cloud regions today!