Comment by colanderman

TI's throughput certainly was slower. It's been a few decades, but I'm pretty sure it was possible to type faster than the interpreter could keep up. (As a point of reference, listing a program was unbearably slow on the TI, and unreadably fast on the //e.)

I suspect it's just that input processing is so cheap on those early architectures, that latency is really dominated by hardware constraints and not by CPU (however slow it might be). Certainly, on the //e, I'm pretty sure the input routine did little more than copy the character to the input buffer and the screen buffer and advance the cursor. The TI's probably was not much more complicated, despite being implemented in bytecode.