He mentioned it first in a radio series, which is excellent. If you've read the book(s) and avoided the radio series, you are doing yourself a real disservice. I made the mistake of listening to the radio version first, and it ruined the books for me (so much of the humor from the radio series didn't translate to book form).

I am curious, what do people object to regarding the Awesome Bar? I find it saves me a lot of time Googling for a website I've been to before (or maintaining a huge bookmark list of every site I might want to return to). Is it too slow on some hardware? It's always been fast (enough) for me on semi-modern hardware.