Jon Diorio from Google announced on Google+ that the freshness and speed of the AdWords data is now much faster for search term, geographic performance and automatic placement stats.
So if you login to your AdWords console and check out the data, the freshness should be updated much more frequently.
Google actually has a page that documents the data freshness of the statistics within the AdWords console. Google said there that clicks, conversions and impressions are delayed by less than three hours.
Here is a chart showing the other data metrics and how long those take to update now:
Faster is better when it comes to data!
Forum discussion at Google+.
