Additionally, being "stuck" pointing straight into the wind isn't a situation where you are stuck with zero velocity indefinitely. The wind is forcing you backwards, and the arrangement of the rudder and keel/centerboard is unstable for going backwards without changing direction. Even if you don't know what you are doing you'll generally point one way or the other enough that you can then fill your sails again and have more normal control.
Ways to make this faster include pushing the main sail on a small boat out to the "wrong" side, tightening the front sail on the "wrong" side of a larger boat, and positioning the rudder only a little off center so that the slowly moving water relative to the boat is less turbulent.
Probably the only time when it is an actual problem is when people are drifting into some obstacle. It seemed to take students a matter of seconds to regain control of their boat when they were surrounded by large expanses of water. When they were frantic, their intuition about what they needed to do when in a hurry prolonged their loss of control.
