It sounds like money needs to be spent to making mining for P2Pool the easiest, slickest, smoothest way to go.
As a long time supporter of P2Pool I will say that this is the most important step.
Imagine if it was integrated into the reference client. Imagine if you could start mining directly to an address you control simply by plugging in your ASIC device and clicking a "start mining" button.
Reference client integration is a nice idea. A GUI wrapper for the miner software would be a cool too. The GUI would automatically connect to a P2Pool for example. It can definitely be done and it would be even more convenient than mining for whatever other pool (mainly because P2Pool does not require any form of user account registration, ever).