I remember back in the 1990's ActiveWorlds approached the same problem. In a dynamic and streaming world, how do you handle users who are used to local content and instant gratification?
Their answer at the time was the ActiveWorlds High-Rez CD, which was a supplemental CD that you could purchase and use in conjunction with ActiveWorlds client, whereby the textures being downloaded would instead come from the CD and were all double resolution.
Bundling the SL Viewer with pre-cached textures and assets wouldn't be a good idea, because as ActiveWorlds eventually found out - it breaks the immersion factor the moment those users leave that introductory area.
Comes across like false advertising in the user minds. Not surprisingly, shortly after that little "experiment" by ActiveWorlds, they abandoned the High-Rez CD idea and simply learned to build a better environment to accommodate the first user experience.
The idea with wireframe incremental loading is interesting, because it at least breaks the experience up into stages mentally and becomes less of a tolerance break. One of the interesting solutions to this was the fading in of models once they were loaded instead of the sudden "pop" in.
I'm more on the side of Karl in that the gradual method is probably better than trying to cram content pre-loaded into the viewer on download. Also because Second Life isn't a game, and it's a bad idea to give Rodvik any more half-assed ideas about how to treat it like further like a game going forward.
I mean, honestly, if he had his way he'd probably try to get it on store shelves as a DVD with a subscription package like World of Warcraft.
"Play SecondLife! Now available at Wal-mart and Best Buy"
*shudders*