RE #3: I do not know for the life of me, why 95% of the block chain isn't downloaded along with the app..that is the first 140K or so blocks really should come with the initial download. Its much smaller than 600 mb when you zip it. Then updating the rest by the client should only take an hour or two.
Doesn't this just shift the burden of serving those blocks from the network as a whole to the site hosting bitcoin.org? Sounds like that would be a bad thing; I'm sure their bandwidth bills are a burden already.
If the bitcoin wire protocol doesn't have an option for compression, I'm sure it would be easy to add it. Then there would be no net bandwidth difference between bundling the blockchain with the client and letting it download on startup.
With all of that in mind, the client sure does need a simple "please wait while the blockchain downloads, X% finished" since it's reasonable to assume that this is the user's first encounter with the bitcoin client and they aren't likely to know what's going on.