As a fellow Azure user, I share your pain – deploying isn’t “quick”https://stackoverflow.com/”painless” – and this hurts especially when you’re in a development cycle and want to test dev iterations on Azure. However, in general deployments should take much less than 60 minutes – and less than 20 minutes too.
Steve Marx provided a brief overview of the steps involved in deployment:
http://blog.smarx.com/posts/what-happens-when-you-deploy-on-windows-azure
And he references a deeper level explanation at: http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/pdc2008/es19