Totally agree with you. :-) I spend so much time every day clicking the little X to kill the download bar. I think Google developers design for 30" monitors or something... I work on a laptop all day and my vertical pixels are very valuable to me.
<control>-j + <control>-w for me (on Linux). That solves the major annoyance of this, which is not having a keyboard command for closing it.
Just curious, how come you have so many things to download? Is that email attachments in web mail? I can't really think of many things to download - usually PDFs, I suppose.
Random cool images I see on the web... I use them as inspirations for apps / sites that I design. Right-click save as... and I'll review them at some point. But now I have this big bar at the bottom that I don't want to see. :-(
You could just drag the images right to your desktop.
You're right, and sometimes I do do that. But most times I'd rather have it end up in my Downloads folder. Also, on my mac laptop, I'd have to drag, exposé-show-desktop, drop, exit-exposé... :)
On OS X, I just put a "drag stuff here" folder in my Dock. Worked pretty well.
firefox + the download sort addon is super awesome. no popup window at all, the thing just saves (customizable based on extension)