You can easily check the speed of fetching an individual piece of content. I check frequently on my projects that pages are served up fast (sub 200ms). In general, it's as fast or faster than it ever has been. You can also test your max theoretical throughput by running parallel GETs on the same piece of big file content (using a "download accelerator").
I suspect you're confusing perceived speed with actual speed. The web is much richer now (as you mentioned). Flash, Javascript, and CSS wreak havoc with rendering time. Browsing the web with anything less than a ~2 year old computer is going to feel a bit sluggish these days. Even with a modern computer it's not going to be as fast as the largely static web of the old days.
Ok, here is a quick test. I am pretty sure none of us has any portion of cisco site in our caches. Copy&paste this link into your browser and see how long it takes for this page to completely load. It has no flash, nothing complex: a bit of text and a few images, very much like things used to be in the 90s:
Loads completely in 2-3 seconds for me. I'm ~20ms away from www.cisco.com (which is served out of San Jose for me). Anyway, that Cisco page actually does contain javascript and CSS. Not a very 90's style page.
Here's a better test of a 90's style page that has a lot of content: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html This page loads almost instantly for me.
For the cisco, it takes about 6 seconds on my average speed connection. If you want to see what takes so long, I recommend using FireFox's Firebug extension. In Cisco's case, it is a simple 20k html file, but then there are 3 js files and 8 css files each of which has to be loaded in a particular order before the page is rendered.
I suspect you're confusing perceived speed with actual speed. The web is much richer now (as you mentioned). Flash, Javascript, and CSS wreak havoc with rendering time. Browsing the web with anything less than a ~2 year old computer is going to feel a bit sluggish these days. Even with a modern computer it's not going to be as fast as the largely static web of the old days.