If having to wait ten minutes to an hour is what makes you not want to use Bitcoin, how about you wait until we come up with a overlay network on top of Bitcoin with instant transactions? It'll happen eventually; I'm working on one such concept myself.
I guess waiting > 24 h for the whole block chain is more the truth (not 10 minutes to an hour) this is annoying. :-(
At least 0.8.0 will have an option to not verify the bootstrap.dat, I think.
smtp