Good point. The headline statement was made in Britain and relativity demands that time and space have to be considered together, so the speed of the IBM 7030 in Britain would have to take into account the data (or physical computer) transfer rates across the Atlantic in 1962. According to the film Forbidden Planet there was a much faster computer on Altair 4 but that is presumably outside the scope of the subject, being far far away, so why not the IBM 7030 as well? Excuse my indulgence in reductio ad absurdum but that's the direction of this debate I suspect.
I think that Chuck is right about computer speed being defined ultimately by the skill of the programmer, not just the hardware, though. I recollect a suggestion at Honeywell to programmers using the Honeywell 200, that they could give an output instruction to a peripheral device before putting any data in the output buffer because it would take a while for the peripheral device to wake up and realise that it was supposed to be doing something. Yes, those were the days ...