I hate to disappoint you, but the main stream user experience of bitcoin remains a clusterfk. Things are slowly improving though (new payment protocol, hardware wallets, zero-conf transactions, lightweight wallets, deterministic wallets, etc.)

This depends on the client. The reference client will not display the funds as available until it reaches 6 confirmations (~60 minutes) but the coins are theoretically available to spend as soon as your client knows about them, it's just a matter of using a client that allows you to do so, and also making sure that the network knows that you have coins in the address you specified as an input before you try to spend them yourself.