Hold the home button while you insert the cable into the phone. This will force iTunes to recognize the phone. I had the same problem and Apple’s technical support suggested I do this.

2) Remote wiping the phone makes it impossible to send any further messages to the phone using the “Find my Iphone service… A little drastic in my opinion. iLocalis (the Jailbreak app Find My iPhone is recreating) allows users to lock out the phone making it only able to call one number that could be selected and modified as needed online. When you lost your phone, you locked it and had it display a customizable message with an option to call the customizable number – Worked great! and You didn’t have to wipe your phone.

Not everybody is a hacker, I don’t need to destroy the encryption codes every time I forget my phone on a table in a conference room.

Well if it indeed does take two hours to erase than chances are they are doing a real erase rather than just nuking the directory. Which is good.

But still that seem like a LONG time.