Don't think of it as the Verisign whois db. They administer the ICANN master whois db for .com, .net, and others. They don't own it. Prior to them, IIRC, it was internic, and prior to that, it was some consortium. In a couple of years, someone else may be the admin. Verisign picked it up as a marketing ployand it's reflected in their domain pricing and notoriously poor service. they are known for sending out spam indicating (without actually saying so) that you have to come to them to re-register a name.
There is no time/propagation advantage to updating dns through verisign than through any other ICANN registrar. All registrars have equal access.