It's a well-known technique used by a lot of products. Github, for example, has a little "slide-in" animation of when you click on a folder in a repo to achieve the same latency masking.
I don't think this should be seen as a negative or bad thing. But it should put things in perspective for those comparing the "performance" between different platforms and OS's.
Another similar example is how Apple doesn't show a pop-up message when an app crashes in iOS, while Android does (Force Close), which makes people think Android crashes a lot more when they keep seeing these Force Closes, even though there have been some reports saying that iOS apps crash more often than Android apps on average. But the perception matters a lot more.
