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Latency is a measure of your computer talking to the server and nothing else. It is also an average, it should start very low and increase slightly.
I use a good number of addons, 75 to be exact, and my latency rarely climbs over 150 milliseconds. That is with three computers connected to WOW at the same time and one streaming music off of Napster. However if someone starts downloading files or more than one PC is doing music streaming, latency climbs through the roof. It doesn't become game breaking in PVE until about 500 milliseconds. I also use Auctioneer, Gatherer and Metamap which all have decent sized datafiles over time and don't see significant jumps in latency.
The only times that I can really think of these mods really impacting transfer or latency is if you are low on RAM or Processor power. If you have 1GB or less of RAM, then you can be doing a lot of pagefile swapping while playing the game. 2GB of RAM should be the recommended amount if you are going to mod the interface. Also shy away from shared memory video cards built into your motherboard or cheap cards. These eat what is available before the programs get access to the memory. The fastest drives you can get can also help. In my kid's computer we noticed that going from a drive with a 2MB cache to one with an 8MB cache improved World of Warcraft performance noticeably. If you're hard drive light is always churning, then this may be a cost effective upgrade.
Games will always push the limits of our PCs and make us upgrade faster though.
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