It’s absolutely true … I was there, I remember the songs. Also, if you don’t want to take my word for it, take Niven’s: see the preface to Ringworld Engineers.
Yeah, Niven specified an orbital velocity of 770 miles/sec IIRC, which more or less matches your number. That’s why you need some kind of unobtainium to build it (and finding the energy to spin it up might be a tall task too). But hey, this is all sci-fi.
Funny thing - after calculating that, I realized that it doesn’t take into account the Sun’s inward pull at 1AU (about 0.6g). To get 1g, you’d need to spin about 0.513% c or 955.6 miles / sec.
Edit: I misplaced a decimal and the inward pull is only 0.0006g, so negligible.
Still, at even 0.4% c, landing on the ring might actually be as hard as building it!
It’s a little funny to me how much of the lore of the first book gets retconned in the second as “yeah Halrloprillalar just lied about everything for fun and then died offscreen before she could explain it”.
And then the tragic ending of the second book gets retconned as “yeah actually everyone didn’t die after all, they were saved by secret unmentioned Puppeteer tech, Nessus just lied about that for fun and then got left behind offscreen before he could explain it”…
I love those books, but Niven really didn’t do a great job of linking each one to the next.