Indeed, shipping the data with the client is just a kludge.
If the main reason that the bitcoin P2P protocol is so inefficient in transferring large amounts of blocks, that should be fixed. I think that’s because of the HDD syncing going on. Maybe this should be held off for the initial download, or the protocol should be made more bittorrent-like for the blocks [0..last-10000], as they are basically set in stone.