A few seconds might be great for transfers, for trades however... just look at mtgox. Also who is the one running the order book? The server?

With domestic transfers I meant that ripple gateways would probably help in you getting a domestic transfer to your account instead of international wires. Instead of paying wire fees, you'd pay hopefully fewer fees to convert to IOUs that a domestic gateway accepts. Then withdraw there.

I know that ripple doesn't use proof of work for consensus, still there are quite some bottlenecks that I can think of. I really wanna know which parts handle which systems in the whole ripple idea.