Can you expand on (3)? It seems at first glance that the end-to-end testing (USB input through to monitor photon output) performed in this test captures the whole of the user's perception and experience.
Latency and throughput are not inverses, although they may exhibit anti-correlation over small ranges. A low latency does not imply high throughput. In particular xterm does not buffer input / rendering, so while individual keystrokes produce a response quickly, when there is a high volume of text the throughput will be lower than other approaches.
This will still feel laggy, just a different kind of lag to the one that you perceive using a high latency terminal.