As a companion release, the Bitcoin blockchain data torrent has been updated.

This torrent gives you a "bootstrap.dat" file.  If you are initializing a bitcoin client for the first time, drop bootstrap.dat into $DATADIR (your bitcoin data directory), and the bitcoin client will import all the block/transaction data found in that file.

P.S.  Long-term seeders are requested and welcome!  See thread linked above for details.