Hi'ya, I'm migrating my code to use cursors at the moment. It's frustrating that calls need to be synchronous rather than how paged calls could be asynchronous. Retrieving 7000 followers just took > 20 minutes for me.
I filed an issue that proposes a solution here: http://code.google.com/p/twitter-api/issues/detail?id=1078 If you retrieve friends or followers, please take a look and give it a star if it's important to you. If anyone can suggest a work around for this, I'd be happy to hear it. Cheers, Tim.