1. There needs to be a lite and quick personal client. When the client has been offline for a bit, it can take way to long to catch up.
I understand people are working on such things. See
Electrum, for example.
Also, the mechanism that the official client uses to download the blockchain is ridiculously slow. I've found that it takes over 24 hours to download the whole thing on a fresh install of the client, and I can get a TV show of the same size in under ten minutes from iTunes. I have no idea if there's something about the technology that requires it to be that way, but it's not the size of the data being downloaded that makes it so slow.
Try the latest client. I read they've got it down to an hour or two, but I haven't downloaded it from scratch with the new code.