There's a couple ways to view the block chain status.  Yes there should be a status bar, but experiencing glitches on some machines.  If you hover your mouse just below network connections, you'll see a tooltip with status.

Also if you go to statistics, and click update statistics, it will show your block height there.

We should have status bar patched for next release.

As far as the 60k issue, we are working on it. Previously devs made a mess of the fork there when they killed the POW early and doubled their premine before they dumped it all. lol (sorry not actually funny)  There can be sticks at 60, 60.5, 61, and 61k.  If you experience these sticks, you may have to restart the client a couple times.  But generally patience will see it through.  And yes can take 8 hours or so to fully sync.

There is also a blockchain download attached to the Git, for those of you who do not want to wait.  Believe it starts at around 90k.