Funny how you talk about isolated cases, because almost every stream I watch I witness players with lag and many of these player live in USA. You probably don't notice the issue because your more of a forum warrior but any one who plays often will tell you the lag is present in almost every game, it's just people have given up complaining because relic can't/won't fix it.
And don't start on about battle servers and how the lag will be the same irrespective of where my opponent lives because there is a noticeable difference when I play Asians and Russians.
Because even if you live just besides the server, the game has a small input delay added into it. I live in Buenos Aires, and i have a physical avg of 180 ping to NY (haven't done a s specific ping to the servers). That's bad but playable. ANY small FPS drop or desync from time to time, can make those lag spikes horrible. NOW, if you are living in Australia, guess what, you are geographically in one of the worst places to be in the world, to connect to NY.
MAYBE the battle servers have issues in order to handle 2 incoming connections with +250 ping. But the only real solution ANY GAME applies is having more servers because you can't go around increasing the speed of light. But that can never be applied to a small game like CoH.