Upgrading from iPhoto '11 to Aperture 3

Apple's iPhoto has a great feature set -- simple and sufficient for day-to-day needs -- but performance comes to a crawl after you've used it for about a year or two. It almost feels like iPhoto is actually Aperture Lite and its supposed to lead you towards that $80 pay wall after one or two years of trial usage.

Anyway, migrating your iPhoto library to Aperture is no simple feat, especially if you're upgrading because your library has outgrown iPhoto's limits (think 100K photos in 3-5K events). Here's what I've learned from my experience:

About the process:

1. I chose to import from my iPhoto library by leaving the image files in their current location. Im not sure if doing otherwise will make things faster or slower. Something tells me its the latter.
2. It could literally take up to one day to finish the entire process.
3. There are three phases: 1) Import, 2) Saving Aperture library, 3) Processing. The first two needs to be done without shutting down Aperture.
4. The import stage could take up half a day, the CPU may spike in temperature at times, and disk I/O will be pretty busy; so be prepared. 
5. The import is not resumable. You cannot interrupt or cancel the import. If you do, you have to start over (i.e. by deleting the Aperture library file before starting the app again). Otherwise, Aperture will just create a duplicate entry in your Aperture library if you try the import again -- duplicate library entries are not detected.
6. Once the import is done, you are not. Closing Aperture will cause it to save its library. This won't take as long as the import, but it can take a couple of hours.

About speed:

1. If you didn't close aperture or when you open it again, it will be busy processing all the photos it has just imported. This will likely take the longest time, but you can close Aperture at any time. So if aperture is slow after its done with the import, its probably because its still processing all the images.
2. Having a speedy HDD (7200rpm or solid-state) will make a huge difference
3. I've read that turning off face detection and automatic preview generation makes a difference -- made no difference to me
4. You can monitor the whole progress by opening Aperture's Activity window. Deselect any current selection on the main window's side bar and minimize the main window -- this seems to help responsiveness

It seems odd to me that Apple made little effort to make the transition from iPhoto to Aperture easier or at least enable us to do the migration in parts over a few sessions. Who are their target users if not upgrading iPhoto users?

After 1 Aperture crash, 3 failed attempts, I'm... still at the processing stage.