There is next to no chance of bricking your device when rooting, I used Flipz pre-Kitchen to root my CDMA Hero.
Custom ROM's speed up the phone greatly, as do custom kernals, and all this "Hassle" you talk about isn't really that hard, a couple restarts of the phone and a few clicks and it's there.
As for the topic of the thread, there is an app for rooted phones called "Apps2Sd", but I do not recommend it. The problem is, if you have all your apps on your SD card, then to take out your SD card you have to have the phone off. If not it will break the links between the app icons on the phone and the apps themselves. Some people have had problems with the app showing as already installed in the Market, but they didn't have the app installed anymore, and when they tried uninstalling the non-existent app they get error messages which wont let them do it.
Just my 2cents