You're right, I was imprecise in my brevity. Speed is definitely a signal in ranking. I'm mainly grousing at classes of results -- like the "Top Stories" carousel -- that are only available to AMP pages, and rather difficult to organically rank above. The AMP results also get more vertical real estate, flashy thumbnails, publisher logo images, etc.
For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only two aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested only by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories also appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7.
So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.
Ah, yeah. Truth be told I realised after hitting 'send' that you may have meant that.
This being the case, I think even if building fast webpages may not allow one to circumvent AMP in the instant, it is still a strong way of removing much of the grounds for its existence.
For example, searching for "Python" returns five pages of results where only two aren't about the programming language. But at the top of the page, bested only by python.org itself, is a huge carousel of 11 AMP stories about snakes in the everglades. These stories also appear in the normal search results, but not until the bottom of page 7.
So somehow the #68 result, "Python hunters eliminate more than 100 snakes from Everglades," got boosted to #2, because rankings #2 through #13 (if you count the AMP carousel) are not available to merely fast and relevant content.