iPod Shuffle sync speed problem (2G version)

My friend Dino wanted a small, no-nonsense music player for jogging and such and I recommended the new Shuffle, out today. It's tiny, it's simple, it's beautiful.

Dino also asked me to show him how to work this in iTunes (he's got a PC and listens to CDs). We hooked it up, picked a playlist of about 20 songs, and hit Autofill...

...and spent the next 10 minutes staring at the "Updating..." screen. It took about 20 seconds to transfer a single song! This definitely smelled fishy, so I resynced the Shuffle with my PowerBook (thinking it was an issue with Dino's USB port), but the slowness persisted.

I found the answer on Apple's support forums, and here it is in case you don't find it there yourself:

When you connect the iPod and click on it under Devices, under the Settings tab, there's a checkbox to "Convert songs to 128 ACC", meaning, to reduce the quality and filesize to fit more songs on the cute li'l thing. Nifty, but also quite unexpectedly slow. Unless you absolutely need loads of songs for your gym run, you'll probably prefer better transfer speeds.