This is not necessarily true. It's possible to have a hardware configuration that is the bottleneck. This is especially true when running Raspberry Pi or similar. Also, slow USB drives can become the bottleneck as well. Most modern desktops and laptops won't run into this though.

EDIT: To answer OPs original question. Yes, I'm pretty sure dedicated chips could speed things up but as another poster said, the initial investment would be large. Also, they would only be useful on initial sync, they wouldn't really be necessary after that.

Now that you've started from scratch the log would be very helpful.

It sounds like a good idea but it's really not for many people. The problem is that you have to trust the creator of the torrent and trustlessness is one of the main features of Bitcoin. As others have said, downloading it via Bitcoin Core isn't much more resource intensive if you're using a desktop. If you're using some sort of low-power device like a Raspberry Pi, then it will take weeks at best to download and index. If you're using a device like that it's best to download it via Bitcoin Core on a desktop and then copy the data directory over to the Pi. In this case the bottleneck would be CPU and memory. With a fast enough desktop the bottleneck becomes bandwidth.