How is having one http link that much faster than having your client download it?
I mean, what if you connect to specific, trusted nodes with the addnode switch... shouldn't some bitcoin nodes be just as fast to download from as an http link?
For that you would need to know that there is an addnode switch, how to use it and you would need know IPs too add. Besides that, if you download it via http you can download a compressed archive of the blockchain, if you download it through the client you will get the blockchain snippet by snippet (uncompressed, if i'm not wrong).
So the regular block chain isn't compressed at all? Why not? Isn't regular RLE pretty trivial to implement these days? Maybe some other reason.