Ok, I am really enjoying Skyrim, and find the immersion factor to be pleasing.

But the one thing that almost ruins the game for me is how annoying it is to swap out spells and weapons on the fly.

If I want a sword and board warrior mage, using spells is a total pain.
If I want to be a mage that uses more than two spells, it is s total pain.

What I don't get, is why the game does not have a 'task bar' like most games have.
Just a nice easy row of buttons that your spells and potions and weapons can be dragged into.
Make the task bar optional even.

What are the chances someone will Mod in a taskbar?

They need to bring back hot keys that they had in Oblivion, this new "favorites" thing is useless for hot swapping as the game gets paused anyway. The chances of getting a mod like that is actually quite high, especially once the dev tools are released. There are already a few people looking to redesign the entire GUI for the PC.

Hotkeys are still in... Try opening your favorites menu, put your cursor over a spell/weapon you want to hotkey and press that button you want to be hotkeyd.

Well that's nice to know, glad the game informed me that feature was there, just like holding down [E] would let me move "on the ground" objects around.

If you read the huge 20 page manual youd know all of that