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There is technically no realistic upper bound to how many products a store can have; there are several in the 500K+ range. However, certain things will have their limitations, mostly in the control panel. That being said, what you are describing in the control panel does not sound right -- those things shouldn't take anywhere near that amount of time to load.
On the front end, as Amy suggests, text searches will benefit greatly from full text indexing. I understand that v5 will be dropping support for Access so that the application can take more advantage of features of SQL server, such as this, which Access will not support. Point there is that the continuing support of Access databases has limited some efficiencies that could have been -- and will be -- introduced.
Are you using cross sell relationships extensively? We have found some serious inefficiencies in the scripting logic behind determining whether to show the "at to cart" button on category, search, etc. type pages which dramatically slow down loading these types of pages. You can quickly check to see what impact this is having on your front end by toggling the "quick buy" feature off (which will bypass all of that logic). If you find that makes a significant difference, please contact me and we can get that shored up for you.
It's also a well known issue that using custom search terms and the Narrow By feature on the front end will slow things down. If you are using that feature, we have mitigated against this on sites needing this feature by pulling in the Narrow By feature via AJAX so that it loads independently of the rest of the page (category an/or search results pages).
As with these couple of suggestions, lots of things depend upon the features you may be using.
That being said, I am very curious about what you report on the Locate a Product feature in the Control Panel. that just doesn't sound right and leads me to wonder about the connection speed and bandwidth between your site and its SQL server (I'm assuming you're running SQL).
At the end of the day, though, the number of products itself is not an issue. Issues would be with the health of your application hosting environment, and then potentially with certain features (and how efficient they may or may not be at the scripting level).
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