Your experience is like my Mom's -- she had all of her children out of diapers by the time they were a year old. She says that once you get a little girl excited about her new frilly panties, they don't want to do anything to mess them up.
Personally, I think that babies are way smarter than we give them credit for, and just because they can't talk and communicate to us in words does not mean they are understanding and absorbing a lot of what they hear and see. How else do you explain the ability of many children to learn words and sentence structure by the time thy are two years old? They understand what we say to them well before they can repeat it back to us.
Toilet training is probably happening later than it used to because of the use of disposable diapers. The kid feels dry, even when the diaper is full of urine, so there is no discomfort, no feedback, and no incentive to prevent wetting the diaper. Put a kid in cloth diapers, and they'll learn more quickly that going to the potty avoids wetness and discomfort.
Did I mention we only had cloth diapers. ;*)