I think they have been trying to push people in that direction. They penalize you for having slow load times and too small of touch zones among a variety of other ux factors. But the progress has been slow.
I don't pretend to know half of the metrics they use to rank a site, but IME, it doesn't seem like speed is at all relevant.
It's more like if you had two sites with identical traffic and identical content relevancy the faster site would rank higher... which makes sense.
If your site is incredibly popular, it's logical to think that people are finding it useful and therefore it should rank higher. That's less true than it used to be, but it's still valid as one of the primary ranking metrics.
I've seen too many of the former to believe Google is trying to push the later.