Personally, one of my biggest issues in trying to wrap my head around the Matrix is letting go of the idea that it is just technology. It isn't.
Ever since 1st Edition the Matrix has been firmly in the realm of "technology so advanced that it might as well be magic". Later editions have only reinforced this idea, with technomancers and the Deep Resonance and The Foundation and all that jazz.
So for me, at least, I'm much less interested in what we can do with the internet today, than what the Matrix is in the 6th World. I keep having to remind myself that the Matrix isn't the Internet, and that my ideas of how modern computer networks function is not necessarily a good model to base the Matrix off of.