Regarding the figures of HW decoding lag of the Kobo it is completely aligned with my experience with TEGRA 4. My ZTE funbox is also 17ms.
17 ms is just over 1 frame. It's completely typical even for the best devices. Because of VSync and triple buffering from Project Butter, that extra frame of latency is there regardless of how fast the decoder is. I'm trying to figure a way around it.