Wow! Thanks for all the comments (you can stop now), I think I have a pretty good idea what you folks think.

Just FYI, disk space is not an issue at all... it is testing that is the issue, we are going to sign this download and put it up in 2 days... our test team would need to do another complete test pass on a multi-file download (it is one now) since it truly is different bits... and we don't have enough time for that! The real decision was whether or not we pushed out the download date to add multi-file downloads... and I don't think we will. If we get feedback that requests the multiple files, we will add that as an additional option in the future

Oh, and I'm looking into using the subscriber download tool... my belief right now is that we can't use it for this without some major work (or as people around here like to say "non-trivial effort is required"), but in the meantime I think I'll point some folks at my column on background copying :)

Thanks everyone!