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.
how many thousands of people are dling bitcoin client every day? I think the hosting bandwidth is trival