I noticed this:
Parallel restore This is absolutely required if time is the issue as serious systems may perform much better in such case.
In 5.1 I added the following option to mysqlimport "--use-threads".
With it you can now tell mysqlimport to use multiple threads while doing an import of a backup made with mysqldump where you specified dumping the database in tab format. I don't believe I have a graph anywhere showing the speedup, but its pretty damn impressive.
Oh, and what is especially nifty about this?
Just take a copy of mysqlimport from the 5.1 distribution and use it on your previous versions of MySQL. I can't promise it will work with anything earlier then 3.23 but I suspect it will :)