The past few years have seen a dramatic improvement in the latency in network switches. Single ASIC based switches can all pretty much switch packets in less than a microsecond. Current 10GE switching silicon provides anywhere from 300 to 800 nanoseconds, specialized silicon shaves that to less than 200 nanoseconds when limiting the amount of searching that needs to be done by reducing the size of lookup tables. Even other solutions play some smart tricks by providing forwarding hints for intermediate switches make those lookups take less than 50 nanoseconds.
Modular switches inherently have a higher latency. Line cards on modular switches typically have multiple ASICs, those ASICs are connected through a single or multi stage fabric. Each step takes time, resulting in latencies varying from around a microsecond when a packet stays on the same ASIC, to possibly 5-15 microseconds when a packet needs to travel through the fabric and back.