The reason none of us have experience lag (at least how we might traditionally think of it) is because that's not how Mario Kart handles connection hiccups. Your own racer is never affected on your own screen. It doesn't play everything in exactly real-time, so weird stuff will seem to happen to someone on your screen, while on that person's screen, nothing strange is going on.
From what I can tell, if another player has a connection hiccup, his racer just dies on everyone else's screen. He'll just keep going straight, usually into a wall (or through a wall) or right off the edge. Once that hiccup is over, we'll see the racer where he is on his screen. So it looks like he's teleporting, but he's not.
This also affects the end of the race occasionally. Have you ever been in third place when you cross the finish line, only to end up getting fourth or fifth place in the rankings? Or have you ever shot a green shell at someone, and it goes right through him, only to have him fly up in the air a second later and the shell disappears? That's all due to lag. Everything ends up how it's supposed to, usually, but what we see on our screens can be a bit weird.
Needless to say, this is an infinitely better way to handle lag than in something like Brawl, where everybody slows down to make up for the hiccups. But for Brawl, that's actually better, I think. It would suck if everyone just hopped and skipped around and you didn't really know where they are at any given time. For Mario Kart, that isn't so pertinent.
Now the coin thing that bob mentioned, I can't explain. I lost maybe three coins in total due to a random -1 thing, even though no one was around me. Unless there's some item that I don't know about, this is either a glitch or a hack. I'm guessing a glitch.
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