I'd happy being able to give the client a local IP and have it copy over the first 100,000 or so blocks quickly.
You can tell the client to connect only to the ip address of another client on your LAN:
see: -connect=n.n.n.n
http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Running_BitcoinI don't know how much faster blocks are downloaded though -- the amount of time isn't necessarily spent entirely on transferring.
If you have a new wallet (no transactions yet), you can download the blockchain files:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/blockchain/Because your client relies on the integrity of the blockchain when processing blocks, you don't want to just use a torrented copy.
Down the road, on the roadmap to Bitcoin 1.0 is a lightweight client that stores "headers only" so the time for a new installation to get to "ready" state will be shorter at some point.