On your timing questions, the answer to both is 'sort of'...
Queries/responses take a finite time, some queries may return multiple pages of data, each page counting as a query.
There's also the extra ten-query 'burst' allowed in the 'first second', in that situation you get sixty queries in five seconds. I don't recall seeing how the first second is determined, perhaps some period without a query resets the timing.
Personally, I don't worry about the rate limit, just follow the retry protocol for handling 429 status, one easy way to do this is to use the Meraki Python library.