Every game has issues with lag. I think people with Piss3's or boXes just don't complain as much. They also get official dedicated servers - which PC games mostly don't. Most PC games rely on clans / enthusiasts to host servers. L4D has been one of the few examples where there are official dedicated servers (provided by Valve).
Presumably, official dedicated servers could be better than user-managed ones?
But, like Soulzz said - every game has techniques in programming to deal with the inevitable lag of playing over the internets (aka "a series of tubes"

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Most online games (including Battlefield 2142) have some predictive routines, which extrapolate the future position of a person/vehicle between the packets, so it appears more smooth than it should be. That's also why you also see vehicles continuing to roll/move into oblivion when you lose connection to a server in 2142 - their client-side predictive routine continues to roll/move a vehicle based on the last known rate of movement/roll... until it gets a new packet of where it actually is from the server.
As you can imagine, these routines (along with a lot of other aspects of the game code) can be altered in many ways, and can become arguably better or worse. For BF2142, they're not as good as Cod4's or L4D/CS:S' ones according to many people.
Personally, I think they did an OK job with 2142 as far as lag goes. The crashing of the servers and the bugs piss the hell out of me... but IMO no other game developer has managed the sheer scale and detail of 2142 successfully - so far. The lag is, sadly, something we have to deal with... especially considering the server's on the east coast (which is great for many, but not for Soulzz or me lulz).
Then again, you have to remember that the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.
P.S. I don't know where Soulzz got the information about Mag and how he can comment on the lag and servers while the game is not even out yet... ?! It could suck as hell - who knows.