If it's cumbersome, you could always edit the sudoers file to make things easier (although it's not a great idea if you're not using it often). If you do that, then you would have the best of both worlds - being able to sudo on terminal from your standard account (with or without password, as desired) while also using it with lower privileges for all GUI applications.
The most cumbersome thing for now seems to be running `sudo` in terminal, but then again, how often do you really need to?