A lot of the mirrors for SUSE are pretty much overloaded right now, you may want to use BitTorrent to download it. If you want the simpliest experience, get the so called "Evaluation edition" (Which has stuff like Flash, RealPlayer, Acrobat Reader, Opera and Java included), it's not like it's a cut-down version, it's just Novell's bad sense of naming schemes
SUSE 10 has apt4rpm included in the box along with yum, I think it's a very good distribution, but I'm sure the Gentoo and Slackware folks will critisise it for being bloated, but if you just do the standard installation with KDE it's pretty slick IMHO.