Exactly. I'd love to run a full node and did for a while, but Bitcoin QT just sucks ass. More energy should be put into developing a wallet that is also a full node, which would make it nice to run instad of a pain.
I actually believe the full node should run in the background as a service and you should never see it. Fire up the wallet and bam, your ready to go.
I think the user experience of running a node has more to do with why people don't run it than disk space issues. If Luke-jr would quit dumpster-diving 486s, we might start getting somewhere.