Quite often I use the Terminal to launch an application using open -a application_name. This is faster than traversing any menus or folders. An even faster way would be to put that functionality on a hotkey, so I wrote a small script which I launch using Dragthing (although there are several other alternatives).
The script shows a dialog and you can simply enter the Name of the application which has to be launched:
tell me
activate
set s to display dialog "Which appliation do you want to start?" default answer "Safari"
do shell script "open -a \"" & text returned of s & "\""
end tell
Copy and paste into the AppleScript Script Editor, save it as an application, and then use DragThing (or similar) to assign it a hotkey.
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040110145210191