There are several things to consider in this debate about hacking and good ping. On the average most people I run into know nothing about truly optimizing their PC's. Some think they do, but when they run into what I call an extreme gamer they tend to get smoked. It's not all about hardware. Computer habits factor in on performance. The more junk you have on your pc, the slower it will be. So for kicks lets take a fictitious extreme gamers system and habits and compare.
1. The EG only uses his system for gaming
2. The EG has a dedicated Internet Connection. He doesn't share it in a LAN
3. He uses a Hardware based firewall (Modem or Router) no software firewall.
4. He doesn't download junk, or surf other than for patches, a needed IM, or Voip. So there is no need for virus,malware,or adware scanners.
5. He installed his OS using Vlite, or Xlite thus giving him a light OS with the bare minimum services needed to run the OS and the Choice Games.
6. He went into the Bios and disabled unneeded pci,usb,printer, gaming ports.
7. Installed a dedicated sound card and a Killer Nic to help reduce CPU loads
8. He installed tight low latency gaming Memory
9. Overclocked his system to 4.2Ghz (on Air, Core2duo E8400,E8600,I5,and I7s can do this)
10. He invested in a very good Solid State Drive
11. He has decent Graphic Card(s). Not a big issue with UO. It is still a sprite based game and most of the graphics are generated through the CPU (that includes the EC)
12. He goes through a barrage of tweaking, checking with tweakguides.com to make sure he didn't miss anything.
13. He removes unneeded junk out of the UO folder and sets his UO.cfg file to more modern standards.
For the most part latency is an internal issue and not really to much on your hops. The quicker your cpu processes incoming and outgoing packets the faster your gaming will be and every pc can benefit. I walked a friend through a similar process and his rig was an ancient athlon XP 2800 and even today he uses the same system and gets called a hacker.