Was that running bitcoind on a server somewhere, or on a consumer laptop with a home internet connection?
Even if it "only took about 2 hours," we're living in a world where companies are living and dying by shaving 30ms off page load times and a/b testing the color of their signup buttons.
The multibit client is a much better, though still reduced-security, option.
The sync comments there are outdated— I installed a new Bitcoin node two days ago and the sync only took about 2 hours from nothing.