It sounds like I can just move my bandwidth hungry servers to europe and eat the latency penalty- is that a correct read?
If you don't care about high upload/download speed from/to NA<->EU then yes, that's a good move. Otherwise closeness in geo is still king.
The real problem is going to be anything more complex than that. Most request-response protocols too chatty and won't send enough independent outstanding requests to fill up the bandwidth delay product of an intercontinental link which will kill the throughput. Also users don't like to wait for slow responses no matter what throughput you can sustain for large transfers.