Well, I've got to say BitTorrent has come a long way...
I installed the optional "shadow" client available on my Mandrake 10.0 system, read up on the firewall requirements, punched through, found a torrent, and nothing happened. "Failed to connect" - real helpful.
However, I hunted around, and did manage to find a decent torrent, and sure enough, I got about what I get when I can manage to find a good FTP server, 300+ kB/s. The speed often dropped below that, down under 200, but what the heck, chances of finding a full-speed ftp feed on an iso are pretty poor too.
Error reporting could be better. It's likely that that "failed to connect" was actually inability to write to the target directory, which also gives a meaningful "failed" when I know that's the problem. There are still a lot of bogus torrents listed out there. Maybe it's a good idea, but I still say it's not quite there yet.
(Oh, and the firewall thing is so basic that it should be easy to code around it, or at least pop up the directions when the cleint detects that it's blocked.)