You mean that's what made it so hard to get into bitcoin in the first place, preventing its wider adoption? I know when I originally bought some bitcoin (back when it was ~$3/btc) it took WEEKS. The US govt hadn't yet said 'we won't kill you if you follow the rules and work as a money-handling institution' so I had to create an account with Dwolla (badass service that needs to see more adoption), which required the 3-day wait to verify my bank account, then transfer money into the Dwolla account, which took another 3 days, then transfer from Dwolla to the exchange (MtGox but I luckily did not let MtGox hold my coins).

Not too long ago, there were companies formed that used bitcoins faster payment clearing to offer faster processing to some sort of trading companies, I remember reading about their IPO. That was before the time for bitcoin transactions to clear started growing significantly... according to an article I found on HN a week or so ago, that's what's going to finally kill off bitcoin. Due to not increasing the block size, either wait times or processing fees will keep growing steeply.