If it was taking a long time, it was probably on the step to import edits, and you probably have close to 1 million of those. There's not much that we can do to improve the speed of copying that many items... all we can do is wait for it to finish.
Like you said, a command line script might help. It would eliminate some overhead of the repeating HTTP request, but I really think that you being a single user on localhost (and not having to connect through a chain of external servers) would have made this negligible anyway.
Since there isn't currently a command line script, and one hasn't really been requested before, you'll have to use the existing import script. I would say that however long it takes on localhost is a very optimistic estimate of how long it would take live.
However, if you are importing from an external IP address into your localhost database, then the latency of this connection is slowing things down a bit. If the original database is hosted on the same machine as your live site, then this effect would be reduced in a live import.