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Well my Vista 64 home premium SP1 did not have the registry change built in. But you probably meant the patch that made the fix work because pre-SP1 on Vista the registry change does nothing at all. If you have a Vista SP1, you still need to change the registry for this to work. What you don't need to do anymore is patch your OS first, so that it actually has an effect.
As for the placebo question: Pewsey, you can come from the opposite side. You can with relative ease find out the IP address of your realm you are playing on. Then you can ping / traceroute this IP address without any registry change and you get a certain round trip time readout. You will hit some firewall blocking the pings but that's at the border of the blizzard-server space so it's basically one step before the realm.
Now you can go in-game, without the registry change, play for five minutes and read the latency reported here. It should be quite a bit higher.
Then exit the game, perform the change, reboot your system and re-enter the game. Again play for five minutes and look at the latency displayed in-game. It should much more match the out of game ping number now. And the game certainly does not show you artificially changed numbers because it monitors whether you set that registry key or not (besides there being other ways to achieve the same effect without using the registry key). Not exactly scientific proof but it's reversible and repeatable at will.
Note though that the in-game latency display is a smoothed average value, if you want something more accurate, use recounts realtime graph. You will have jitter (variation) of your latency and I'd expect the jitter being more pronounced when you use the registry fix than when you don't.
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