I just hit 80 a few hours ago. I quested my balls off, even those horrible low droprate collection quests. The fact is, they are prerequisites to finishing ANY chain...

I highly recommend doing the ring of blood style events in Zul'Drak and Icecrown. Not only do they have great rewards, but the XP+Gold+pots is huge (over 100k xp in the Icecrown event alone)

I also did a lot of the dailies. Some are designed to be quick and painless gold, well pre-80 they are also a quick way to get 22k xp.