Web Accelerators - snake oil or miracle remedy?

Perhaps this question is borderline off-topic but since high scalability solutions often have a global aspect I will give it a try...

Have anybody had any experience with different techniques for speeding up their application to places that have a problem with poor ping response time? Ideally I would love to be running only one data center world-wide but one day I know that our sales department will sign up a customer with an unacceptable response time... Could installing a web-accelerator in front of our application extend the reach of our current data center or will we just add complexity and another source of potential errors?