Two-and-a-half hours flat for a 1000 samples per pixel image at ~4500x2500 pixels. Not too bad at all I would have thought. Bit of a shame there is still some noise left in the blurry parts of the image, I always thought it ironic that depth-of-field and glossy reflections take longer to come up with a less detailed image, but there you go…
Not until Cycles can completely render any image in less than 0.3 seconds, please. OK: 0.5 if you insist. This probably won’t happen for at least 2 more generations of GPU development and some major speedup refinement by Nathan, et al.
Edit: I re-read what you said and realized you were talking about stand-alone. I thought you meant display modes.