Sure it takes more time. You have to import your files in to LR or whatever convertor you use. You have to select all of them and apply your formulas and do a batch process. Then you have to create a folder separate from your original, then tie your computer up for however long it takes to process these images. An hour or so later you come back and then you can send them to your client. It is all time and if it isn't necessary for someone selling their pictures why make the extra work? No need in it for that person.
I don't understand this perspective at all - it simply is not that hard.
I have a nearly four year old Apple laptop, which is still a stock model aside from having had a replacement internal hard drive and update to the latest OS. Both JPEG and RAW import to Lightroom at pretty much the same speed, and never slow enough to be an issue. RAW files are usable almost everywhere on the Mac - you can preview them in the Finder, for example. 'Developing' a RAW file takes milliseconds rather than minutes.
The import process in Lightroom is pretty much transparent, and you do not need to configure anything. In the simplest case, just install Lightroom and plug in your camera. The software will pop-up a dialogue asking if you want to import all photographs other than duplicates. Click 'import' and it will import the images and apply sensible default development settings. Done.
Extracting images to send to a client (or upload to Flickr or whatever) is just as easy, the only difference being that you need to select the images to output and select 'export' rather than selecting the images on the computer and copying them. Same effort in both cases, except that Lightroom can also *optionally* change file dimensions, compression level, watermarking and metadata automatically for each exported image.
I would argue that shooting JPEG in camera is much more fiddly than using Lightroom - because of the bewildering array of JPEG options to select from, the fact that they are usually different between cameras, and the fact that if I get it wrong in camera I would need a time machine to fix it :-)
There are real reasons to prefer JPEG over RAW: burst speed and length (sports), easy of immediate transfer (journalism - or anyone trying to use the images directly on an iPad...). However, if speed and difficulty of handling the files is a major issue then there is probably something very wrong with your computer/software setup...
