If you run bitcoind first time, it will cost hours to download the block chain. In this process it won't output useful information such as downloading progress or downloaded block count. So how could we know how much time remaining to finish the downloading?
We can use following command to get downloaded block count:
bitcoind getblockcount
And we can get the latest block number of bitcoin network by visiting this url: http://blockexplorer.com/q/getblockcount