My Ethernet-connected PC will have finished downloading the page before yours even started. Great bandwidth alone, without a correspondingly good latency, is worthless. It's true that sliding-window protocols like TCP are designed to cope with latency, and it's also true that companies like Sandcastle Inc. have developed very effective techniques to mask latency in interactive appliations. However, it's important to remember that while these techniques are clever solutions to an unfortunate problem, they do not make high latency network hardware desirable, acceptable or excusable. That would be like saying that because all cars have shock absorbers we'd prefer all our roads to be full of pot-holes.
Shock absorbers make a rough ride smoother, but shock absorbers on a smooth road are even better.
Well, actually no. Pictures and images. The modem can't compress data that's already compressed. Java applets can be big, but on Web servers they're already compressed into zip files. Video files are big, but they're always compressed with MPEG or QuickTime.