As far as lag between multiple players on line is concerned, you have to realize that no matter how close or how far away your friends are, there will always be communication lag no matter what. It is virtually impossible to have zero lag. In a vacuum, electrical waves can travel the speed of light, therefore on earth, using wires connected to millions of computing devices all which have a job to do like your game controller, computer, network card, router, modem, gateway, hops from server to server (many hops possible when travelling around the world), back through a gateway, modem, router, network card, computer etc.......have any idea how many lines of code and miles of wire and number of pieces of hardware that is? You expect there to be no lag or latency? Ok. Even with the best online multiplayer games out there, no matter the product, there will always be latency. It cannot be helped......perhaps maybe.......if all the devices out there used supercooled quantum computing components. Even then there would likely be measurable latency. Even if 2 computers were directly hooked together, latency would still ocurr.....just less perceivable by the humans using them. Nothing in computing is instant.
That being said......it is also possible for a product to just really suck on top of all I mentioned in the prior paragraph. Here's a couple of articles on lag or latency:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access#Challenges_.26_limitations
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lag
