Live status report for Import part 1 (preprocessing/validating)

Recently I found myself needing to import 18,000 contact records into CiviCRM. I loaded the data into a MySQL table, and ran through the Import pages. Once I had set up my field mapping and hit 'continue' CiviCRM seemed to do some kind of pre-processing or validation in order to alert you of any errors before you do the actual import. While it is doing this (which in my case took 4.5 hours) there is absolutely no feedback to let you know if anything is happening or not. Because of this, it actually took me 2 days to get past this step as I simply thought it had crashed or timed out. Once the data has been validated, and you continue to do the next step of actually performing the import, you get a nice little ajax popup that gives you a progress update - a visual indicator so that you know exactly what is happening. I suggest also having this visual indicator for the validation step, which can take equally as long.