Are staggered remote GETs implemented for replicated caches as well?

The release notes of Infinispan 8 describes a new feature: Staggered remote gets.

These are described in the user guide:

11.4. Distribution Mode

The remote GET requests are staggered: we request the value from the primary owner, but if it doesn’t respond in a reasonable amount of time, we request the value from the backup owners as well.

This feature is documented for the Distribution Mode only.

• Is this feature used for Replicated Mode as well?
• Generally speaking: Is it safe to assume that replicated caches are a special case of distributed caches?

Generally speaking, yes it's true that Replicated Mode is a special case of Distributed Caches. The code is pretty much the same, with the exception of Replicated mode keeping an amount of replicas which is equal to the size of the cluster: each node will also be a full replica.

A Get operation will not issue a Remote Get when the current node is also an owning replica of the entry. So while it's true that a Remote Get would also be "staggered" if it the method was invoked, in practice when you have Replication you will never actually perform a Remote Get.